


A Little Less Dead

by MildlyMoonstruck



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Based loosely off of 'Warm Bodies' actually, Blood and Violence, Eatin' brains and the usual zombie stuff, M/M, Minor Character Death, Multi, ON HIATUS - See Author Profile, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-02
Updated: 2014-05-22
Packaged: 2017-12-31 05:52:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1028021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MildlyMoonstruck/pseuds/MildlyMoonstruck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hope drives people to fight back, in any way they can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. When Nightmares Come

**Author's Note:**

> OKAY SO HEY. First off, the title is a working title, but it's part of a quote that R says in the movie 'Warm Bodies,' which is, "I don't want to hurt you. I just want to feel what you felt. To feel... a little better. A little less dead." And I thought, for now, that's fitting. So. Yes. Hello. So this is my NaNoWriMo project, based off of kohichapeau's and throneofwaste's Warm Bodies!AU prompt for Ereri, and I saw it and I was like, 'Wow. Yes. Yes, this.' And so now I'm writing this. Yooo. Also, this is my first experience writing in first person and wow is it terrifying.
> 
> P.S. I was rereading some sections of the manga and noticed that actually, sometimes Levi speaks in an extremely causal way. Like, he says 'ya' instead of 'you' and 'outta' instead of 'out of', and I just thought that was interesting. So if you think Levi sounds particularly inelegant when he talks here, it's deliberate.

Despite it being only half a decade since the outbreak, nobody really remembers the beginning. No one can recall the how or the why, and even if asked about it, it’s better not to answer. It’s better not to dwell on the past, because surviving isn’t something anyone does by taking a brisk jog down a blood-stained memory lane—not with corpses at your heels.

There are things that everybody remembers, of course. It’s not like there are no records anywhere; back in the year after it happened, when humanity had finally gotten a leg up and worked towards re-establishing their place in the world, people had written about the outbreak. But, most of the books gloss over the way it happened in favor of wringing out every detail of life afterwards. The fear. The panic. The list of the dead, although people stopped trying to record that quickly enough when they realized that the numbers were dwindling too fast to be accurately tracked.

There are estimates, though. About half of the population. That’s the phrase everyone throws around, because it has just enough impact to highlight the severity of their reality, but it’s not so harsh that it completely takes away what hope people have left. Hope, nowadays, is a basic necessity. Hope gets people out of bed in the morning, gets them up, makes them work.

Hope drives people to fight back, in any way they can.

“Levi, it’s time to go.”

“Yeah, yeah, gimme a sec,” he mutters at his reflection in the mirror, gunmetal gray gaze every bit as sharp as the cutthroat razor in his gloved hand as he brings it up and shears off the last section of hair on the side of his head. Behind him, he hears a soft, rueful click of the tongue.

“You had such nice hair, though.”

He snorts and flicks the razor shut, setting it down. “I don’t need another fuckin’ corpse trying to grab me by the hair again; it’s too risky to keep it long,” he says matter-of-factly, giving a perfunctory swipe of his hand over the fresh undercut and brushing off any stray strands. He sweeps up the thick black locks of hair that had fallen on the ground and dumps them in a nearby trash pail before grabbing the razor and tossing it over with a quick, “Thanks.”

Petra snatches it out of the air with ease and slides it into the deerskin pouch on her hip. She frowns and lifts a section of her own hair between her fingers. “Do you think I should cut mine?”

Levi gives her a brief once-over and answers, “You’re fine. Give it another month.”

She nods and jokingly salutes him, and he rolls his eyes and gestures for her to follow him out of the dome tent. Outside, the rest of his team is waiting, and he barks out a quick inventory check. Luckily, it doesn’t take them too long—all they’re doing is heading into the abandoned section of the city for their monthly medical supply raid, so all they need are the basics: gear and guns.

“Everybody got their papers?” he calls, raising a hand and displaying the folded document that is their only pass back into the walls. They all call out an affirmative, and Levi says, “Alright. Show me your wings.”

In a motion that’s been well-practiced ever since the formation of the team six months prior, all of them hold out their arms, wrists turned up to display the marks of a Scout—a wing tattooed on the inside of each wrist, one light and one dark. Levi nods and says, “Good. Now let’s get the fuck out of here; this place smells like shit.”

That’s an exaggeration; it smells like ash, actually. The air near the gate is always dirty, filled with smoke from the several oil drum fires that the military always has going. The clothes of an average person nowadays are shabby and thin at best, so most people would rather be warm than be clean. Though that still doesn’t stop Levi from wrinkling his nose at the bitter stench and complaining.

“Good to know that if the corpses don’t kill us, at least we’ll be living ‘til the ripe old age of forty, when we kick it from lung cancer,” Levi mutters, flashing his papers at a guard. Behind him, Gunther and Erd chuckle.

“Nah, I bet the good doctor could fix us up,” Auruo drawls, eliciting another round of laughter and a faint smirk from Levi as they all line up in front of the big screen.

Petra frowns and jabs an elbow into his side, hissing, “Don’t say things like that.”

“Oh, come on, Petra. It was just a joke,” Auruo mutters, looking slightly apologetic.

“Well it wasn’t a funny one.”

“I was just—”

“Ain’t no doctor fixing us up if we don’t bring back the right supplies because we were too busy arguing to listen to the briefing,” Levi says warningly, and his squad snaps to attention just as the giant screen mounted up on the wall flickers to life, static whining before it clears.

A grainy image of a dour man with a lined face and dull eyes appears on the screen. It takes a moment, but then he nods and begins to speak in measured tones. “Hello, and thank you for your service today. In the five years since our world was destroyed by the outbreak, since our walls were erected, we have counted on young volunteers like you to gather resources from beyond the wall.”

Levi tries not to roll his eyes; he’s heard this opening speech countless times—they all have—and even though he’d snapped at the others for not listening, that’s really more for appearances rather than because he actually gives a shit about what ‘the good doctor’ has to say.

They always hear different speeches for different missions. For the occasional hunting mission to bolster the food supply, they’re briefed by Dot Pixis, a war veteran who came up with the ration system that Sina follows and has a genuine care for the people and their living conditions. He’s well-known and not at all bad to listen to, mainly because he’s an honest man who’d never bullshit anyone. For reconnaissance missions—far more frequent than hunting ones, and also far more dangerous—they’re always listening to Keith Shadis, the founder and man in charge of the Scouts, Sina’s military force. Levi knows him better than the others because he’d trained under the man a year ago when he’d turned eighteen and signed up for the military. A man like Shadis—blunt and who always gets straight to the point—is a man that can be counted on.

And then there’s Dr. Grisha Jaeger.

“But first, a word of caution,” he intones, and his image is replaced by a shaky view of a corpse.

 _‘Corpses are fuckin’ gross,’_ Levi thinks, sneering at the paper-pale face on the screen, with its blank eyes and gaping mouth. _‘God, they look so friggin’ stupid.’_

“Corpses look human,” Dr. Jaeger’s voice drones on. “They are not. They do not think, they do not bleed. Whether they were your—” There’s an odd glitch here, the sound cutting out for the briefest nanosecond before snapping back in, like the take had been edited. Anyone listening for the first time might have missed it, but Levi’s heard it enough to pick it out easily, and it makes him frown. “—mother or your best friend, they are beyond your help. They are uncaring, unfeeling, incapable of remorse.”

In the pause that follows the words, Levi feels more than sees the members of his squad shift uncomfortably. Next to him, Auruo clears his throat, and Levi cuts his eyes to the side and gives him a warning glance.

“Just picture them as this,” Dr. Jaeger says, and static fills the screen for a second before the image changes. Levi folds his arms and studies it carefully, the way he always does when he sees footage of a Boney.

Boneys are vicious, unforgiving creatures. It makes his lip curl in disgust just thinking about them—skeletal, hollow-eyed and devoid of flesh. Boneys are where most of the danger lies in missions outside of the walls; they’re faster than corpses are as well as unpredictable, which makes them deadly and not at all easy targets. Every member of the Scouts learns this rule well: corpses, you should fight. Boneys, you should run.

Dr. Jaeger’s face flickers back onto the screen. “As sons and daughters of one of the three remaining human settlements on Earth, you are a critical part of what stands between us and extinction. Therefore, you have an obligation to return to the walls safely, and if you remember your training, you will. Good luck,” he finishes, and the image freezes.

There’s an awkward pause before Erd scratches the back of his head and mutters, “Getting advice on how to be ruthless from the most ruthless. It’s effective, if nothing else.”

“Don’t let Ackerman hear you say that,” Gunther cautions him, shouldering his gun as they all head for the gate. The girl in question is standing under one of the military tents, discussing something with one of their most skilled strategists. She glances up as they pass and offers a curt nod to Levi which he returns, not even batting an eye at the thin, pink scars running down the right side of her face.

“Daddy dearest ain’t the one she’d take offense to us talking smack about,” Levi remarks, but he still waits until they’re out of earshot to say it. They all give the allusion to Mikasa Ackerman’s familial issues the moment of respectful silence it deserves, and then the gate is looming before them as the warning bells begin to clang.

“Ready your weapons,” Levi calls as the giant stone slab protecting the inhabitants of Sina from the outside begins to rise, baring the abandoned world to their view.

If filthy describes what lays inside the walls, then savage is the term that he would use to describe the outside. It’s still dirty—the city is decaying steadily, littered with garbage, shattered glass, and the occasional body. But there’s a feral sort of nature that has begun to take over—overgrown plant life in what used to be parks, and the wild animals that come through. For whatever reason, the corpses never touch them. Humans are their only game.

Levi takes a few cautionary steps forward, sharp gaze scanning the surroundings for any movement, any sign of life that isn’t them. When all he’s met with is an unnatural stillness, he slowly relaxes, and the others follow suit.

Glass crunches under his heavy boots as the group moves forward, away from the gate that begins to slide shut once more. It closes with an ominous, low thud, and then they’re alone in the world. There’s silence for a few moments, save for their breathing, and then Gunther says, “Look alive, guys.”

They all release the same kind of laugh—half relief and half amused, with the slightest tinge of apprehension. And then they’re all quiet, because a basic rule of training is never talk unless you need to; how else will you hear the corpses?

Levi has memorized the route to the old hospital that his mother used to take him to when he was a child, back before the outbreak. He remembers a long-forgotten childhood aspiration to be a doctor someday. Stupid, maybe, but the hospital had been so big and impressive with its smooth stone exterior and pristine, shining insides that he thought working at a place like that would’ve been a dream.

It’s nothing more than a dream now, though. He’s found other ways to be useful, and ‘pristine’ is one of those words that people will read in books but probably never use again. Nowadays, cleanliness can’t even be called a privilege anymore—it’s more of an extreme rarity, and the only things that ever shine are blades and bullets.

Levi expects the entire thing to go smoothly as ever; this is their fourth medical raid, so they know the drill by now and manage to make it into the hospital’s pharmacy without any major problems. “Painkillers are top priority on this mission,” he reminds everyone, scanning the shelves lined with little bottles, searching for the labels that will get them paid.

“I thought I saw Vicodin the last time we were here,” Petra whispers, crouching low to search a bottom drawer.

“If we could get our hands on Vicodin, I know plenty of people that’d give us a hell of a lot more for it than Jaeger would,” Levi scoffs, pocketing some ibuprofen. The wall furthest from the door is loaded with goods, most of them basic but still enough for them to make decent bank. He fills his bag quick enough and starts looking for non-essentials when there’s a clatter from behind him. His brow twitches in irritation, and he snaps, “Watch the noise.”

“That wasn’t us.”

Levi whips around and raises his rifle in one swift move, cocking it and aiming at the door. The others follow suit, and he remains rooted to the spot, scowling at the tiny frosted glass panel that doesn’t do shit at revealing whatever might be outside. He feels his heart rate spike and body tense, mind racing as he assesses the situation. Again, there is another sharp noise, and it doesn’t sound that far off.

“Levi?”

“Ain’t no windows in here,” he bites out, eyes narrowing; the only way out is through the door. “Shit.”

“We’ll just shoot our way out,” Auruo says with forced bravado. “No problem, alright?” Levi sees his arms trembling.

“Don’t lose your fuckin’ heads, now,” he cautions, steely gaze darting between their terrified faces. He grits his teeth; there’s no time for a pep talk, no time to reassure them that they’re competent and they’ve come back alive from missions before. They should be able to do it again.

Levi opens his mouth to issue another order when something big and heavy slams into the metal door from the outside, and Gunther panics and fires off a shot. Levi throws himself to the side and rolls behind a counter to avoid the ricochet with the prayer that the rest of his team has the good sense to get out of the way, and he hears a shout, a shrill screech, and then a loud bang that sounds like the door giving way and crashing to the floor.

He knows he’s furthest from the door, so he slides out from cover on one knee, other leg braced against the floor as he picks out a target—one corpse crouching above a body with blood around its mouth, chewing, and his chest feels tight with a sudden grief that he has no time for, not if he wants to get out alive just so he can have a chance to mourn whoever it is later. He pulls the trigger twice, hitting it in the side of its head and watching it pitch over and fall, unmoving after it hits the ground.

He forces himself to shut out all the sounds—screaming, groaning—and assess the situation. Before the next second has passed, he knows that their chances are not good. They’re outnumbered, and he scowls and fires off another round into the brain of another corpse that darts at him just as he hears Petra scream. He turns in time to see another corpse leap over a counter at her and slam her head into the wall with a sickening crack; he snarls and shoots.

Back in training, the instructors always advised against anger. Anger, they would say, makes you sloppy. When people get angry, people make mistakes. Never get angry; always keep your head. In most cases, Levi would agree. But now, watching the horde overwhelm his team, he begs to differ. Anger can be useful. Anger can drive. When you can’t mourn, you can get mad.

But even so, he misses the shot. And then he has no time to cover anyone else because a few of the corpses have spotted him, and he knows his first priority is to stay alive. So he holds the trigger, bullets spraying because he no longer has time to pick them off one by one, and maybe replacing the sound of his team screaming with the sound of his weapon will somehow compensate for this defeat, but he knows that won’t be the case. The corpses fall, and he sees Erd lying by the door, already being consumed. He shoots that corpse too, and then he looks around.

“Guys!” he calls, knowing that noise is stupid but giving into the temptation to seek out whoever’s left, _if_ anyone is left. But then, maybe he’s just a masochist, because silence is already blanketing the room by the time he does, and the only answer he gets back is a soft shuffling from behind one of the counters that makes his blood run cold. When he sees movement, he pulls the trigger and then swears when nothing happens but an empty click; he tosses the spent rifle away and slips a blade out of the sheath on his thigh, straightening up and aiming for what looks like the back of a corpse’s head.

But of course, because his luck is nothing but shit now, the corpse stands up at the same time he does, and the knife lodges itself in its spine instead. He grits his teeth. _‘Fuckin’ idiot,’_ he thinks, looking around for any potential weapon and finding none. Nobody had predicted that things would go tits-up the way this mission had. He glances back at the corpse and stops dead, expression slackening.

It’s just a kid. Can't be older than fifteen or sixteen.

He mentally castigates himself for the brief flash of relief that he feels over not immediately killing the corpse before tamping it down. Most of the time, the hordes the Scouts deal with are adults, but occasionally, they’ll come across someone that was turned young. Not very often, but it happens. Petra—thinking the name feels like a metaphysical knife has just been twisted into his chest—had once been attacked by the youngest they’d ever seen: a little girl, no older than five or six, in a blood-stained blue dress with a matching ribbon in her hair. Auruo’d had to shoot it for her, but they’d both cried afterwards.

The corpse has stumbled out from behind the shelves and stands across from him now, staring. Levi grimaces at its appearance; this corpse, like all the others, is fucking filthy. Its long, matted hair falls in curtains around its face, and it’s caked with blood, dirt, and God knows what else. There’s something off about the corpse. It has blood around its mouth and on one of its hands, yes, but there are no other wounds on its body save for that of the knife that’s still sticking out of its back.

Levi narrows his eyes, feeling the adrenaline and the rage fading and coalescing into a hard lump of dread that sinks into the pit of his stomach. _‘No gun,’_ he thinks, backing up a step. _‘No knife. Fuckin’ shit. Wish we’d found that Vicodin; if I’m gonna die, I’d rather do it so fuckin’ high that the bites tickle, that’s my last request,’_ he muses to no one.

The corpse shambles closer, and Levi backs into the shelves on the far wall, bottles of medicine clattering as they topple over. It’s watching him with the oddest look on its face—not dull and stupid like the other corpses, but almost fascinated, unnaturally luminous eyes wide and focused on his face.

Even now, backed into the proverbial corner as he is, Levi still searches for a way out. The corpse is taller than he is—as if he didn’t already have enough to be pissed about—and although it looks younger, has the body of a boy in his mid-teens, something about the transformation of a corpse grants them inhuman strength, so Levi knows attempting to fight it off with his bare hands wouldn’t give him desirable results.

He’s going to die.

He tries not to think of how his friends back in the walls will react, nor does he try to console himself with platitudes about how soon he’ll be with his team. _‘Dead is dead_ ,’ he thinks, staring down the advancing corpse. _‘In most cases, anyways. God, I would fuckin’ kill a man for Vicodin right now. Friggin’ Christ.’_

He feels almost detached from reality now, weighed down by his impending death. _‘What was the last thing I said to someone before I left? Erwin. Think I talked to Erwin. Pretty sure I told him to fuck off for some reason or other. Fuckin’ great. If people actually had gravestones anymore, I’d want that carved right in. Fuck off.’_

“Fuck off,” he mutters aloud, just because he can.

“Nn.”

Levi jerks back and braces his arms on the counter to lift himself up and kick out, boots connecting solidly with the corpse’s solar plexus and sending it reeling. Levi’s heart has spiked into overdrive, beating wildly against his ribcage as he stares at the corpse in wide-eyed astonishment.

_‘Did it just fuckin’ talk?’_

He does nothing but watch as the corpse rights itself and shuffles forward once more, dirty hand reaching out, and Levi swallows hard. He forces himself not to move when he feels the pads of cold fingers brush against the short hair at the base of his skull, though he grimaces.

The corpse opens its mouth— _‘Good-fuckin’-bye, world.’_ —and works its tongue for a moment, pushing it against the backs of its teeth. And then—

“L-Lee—”

_‘Jesus shit.’_

“Le—vi... Levi.”

~~~

I miss my mom.

Everyone has forgotten things. That’s just part of the change. You start out forgetting how you got where you are, and the more time goes by, the more you lose things. Like time—the days, and then weeks and months. Faces of people from your old life. Everything about your old life, really.

Your name. I think that’s one of the worst things, to forget your name.

I wish I could remember my name. Even just a little bit, like the first letter, would be nice. At least I would have something.

I remember my mom, though. She’s the one thing I haven’t forgotten after all this time, but that’s probably because I wear something that belonged to her around my neck, and it opens up so I can see the little, round inside with her face on it. Her face from before the change, healthy and pink, with a really bright smile and big, round eyes. She had long, brown hair, too—longer than mine, and it was clean and shiny. It was probably really soft, too.

I miss my mom.

I think part of me is probably glad that she isn’t around anymore, though. I feel like, even though she would have been just another corpse like me, there probably would have been a part of her that would be disappointed in me for this. She would understand, maybe—hunger is awful. Out of all the feelings to have in this state of not-life but not-death either, hunger is probably one of the last things I would have picked to keep feeling, second only to the need to use the bathroom. I really don’t miss that, to be honest.

Hunger is awful. And not because of the way that it gnaws at my insides, but because it doesn’t leave me with any choice but to satisfy it. Not if I want to keep… existing. I guess that’s the word for it.

Then again, it’s the days when I have to sate this need that make me feel like not existing isn’t an option that sounds all that bad. Not having to feel something awful seems like a pretty nice thing.

But then I think about what I get out of eating, how I feel when I feed and, well… I can’t help it.

I spend a lot of time thinking about my mom, but times like this, when I’m heading into the city and I meet up with a pack along the way, my thoughts purposely avoid her. There are things I could think about. I could think about how I lost her, to make me angry. And if I got angry, maybe I wouldn’t feel so guilty about needing to eat. Maybe.

But I don’t think I want to do that. I don’t want to risk getting so angry that I become like the others. The ones who actively abandon whatever they had left in their old life.

The ones who choose to throw away the remains of what made them human. Boneys.

I don’t like them.

I really want to be human again, actually, but that’s impossible. There’s no way to undo this. It sucks, really. I can’t go back to what I was before, and I don’t want to go forward and embrace this existence, so all I can do is just… wait until I get too hungry to ignore it, I guess.

The pack stills halfway down a wide, empty road. Little green vines grow in the cracks, and I watch them shift in the wind. I hear the others fill their lungs with unnecessary air, and there’s a tension that wasn’t here a moment ago. I know they’ve found people. I can smell it, if I try, but I don’t want to. I’d rather smell something clean and fresh, like the one time I was out wandering through the suburbs and found a chipped, clay pot with a vibrant, purple flower in it. I took it with me, but it wilted a few days later, and I had to throw it away.

I stay in the back as the pack moves into a looming, stone building with crawling ivy creeping up its sides. Something about this place seems familiar, but I don’t really know why. It’s quiet and dark, and the smell of beating hearts gets too strong for me to ignore the further in we go. I get eager now, stumbling to keep up and knocking into a metal cart that falls over, spilling shiny, sharp objects onto the floor. The glint of one catches my eye, and I impulsively pocket it.

No one turns back at the noise I’ve made, but the air changes. It still smells like heartbeats, but there’s something sour and unpleasant now, and I purse my lips at it. The others move faster, though. I guess they like it.

Soon, the source is right in front of us, blocked by a metal door. I want to check if it’s unlocked, but another corpse charges right at it, colliding with a loud bang. A moment later, there’s a loud crack and something hits the door from the other side—‘ _Bullet,’_ I remember. _‘Gun. Weapons.’_

While the rest of the pack charges in, I move to the side, sliding down to the floor with my back against the cold wall and fingers in my ears. I really hate this, I do. I can’t do what everyone else can—honestly, if eating didn’t feel so good, I would be happy to starve. I can’t kill people, though. I don’t want to. I just wait until the clamor starts to die down, and the impact of something slamming into the opposite side of the wall vibrates through me and prompts me to move. As quickly as I can, I turn and peek my head into the room.

In the straight, wide aisle that stretches from the door to the far side of the room, there’s a human.

There’s a word for him. Back when I kind of remembered how to read, I would take books from the building not too far away that held scores of them. Lots of them had words about this kind of thing—I may not know much anymore, but I know that this is a thing, an important thing—and I know that there was one word that was used to describe this. When someone sees someone else, and it’s like, for one second, everything gets really quiet and still. There’s one word for that.

Actually, there are probably lots of words that can describe the human, and I can’t think of a single one. But I watch him until I realize that standing with just my head in the doorway while he’s firing a gun is stupid, even for a corpse.

Especially for a corpse, come to think of it.

I slip inside without him seeing me and crouch down behind a counter. I look to the side, and there’s blood splattered on the wall that streaks all the way down to the floor, where there’s the body of a girl. Her head is open, streaks of red smeared across her face, and I can see that her hair is supposed to be light, but it’s stained dark, and it makes me feel unpleasant. I press a hand against my chest. It feels painful—at least, I’m pretty sure that’s pain—and my eyes feel like they’re stinging, but I don’t know why. I don’t like this feeling at all.

I can stop the feeling, though. And even though I still hesitate, in the end, I give in and take a bite. And then I’m ravenous, craving, needing to fill myself up with more than sustenance far more than I feel guilty, far more than I wish I could remember the word that people used to say to each other when they did something wrong and felt bad about it.

I shut my eyes against this world and, for the first time in what suddenly seems like too long, _feel_. There’s a pop of sensation from deep in my skull, and I’m tunneling through a consciousness that no longer exists anywhere else but inside the memories buried in the girl’s brain. I take a deep breath through my nose and smell smoke that isn’t really here.

I open eyes that aren’t really mine, and I’m looking inside a tent that’s cluttered with gear and, near the corner with his back to me, the human that I’d seen. He’s not crouching or holding a gun now, though. He’s standing, leaning over a porcelain bowl and dragging a sharp razor through his hair, letting the thick black locks fall away.

“Levi,” a voice says, and my mouth is moving but the words aren’t mine. “It’s time to go.”

“Yeah, yeah, gimme a sec,” he says, and his voice makes my chest feel funny, except the sensation is magnified, because it also makes the girl’s chest feel funny too. There’s an odd double-thump that comes from behind my—her? Our?—ribs. It feels nice, and I like it the same way I like that first word she’d said. Levi. That’s his name, I realize. His name is Levi.

I wish I could remember my name.

There’s a soft cluck of a tongue—that’s a weird motion of the mouth, and it feels strange—and the girl’s voice says, “You had such nice hair, though.”

There’s a strange gap in the memory, warping it, and the next thing I know, Levi is standing right before me, looking me up and down before meeting my eyes and saying, “You’re fine. Give it another month.”

I don’t even linger over the fact that I have no idea what a month is; instead, I try to recreate that second where those intense eyes met mine. I liked that.

I can’t, though, because his voice, his shout, pulls me out of the memories and lands me back on the cold tile floor of the room, hot blood slippery on my palm and spread down my chin. The memories—the feeling of being alive—slips away, and I feel bad again, my chest hurting and my eyes stinging. I reluctantly pocket the chunk of brain matter that I’m holding and shuffle back on my hands and knees, my head bumping against the counter edge. I stand up and trip a little, feeling something hit me and stick in my back.

 _‘I’m not mad at you,’_ I think, making my way back into the aisle and facing him. _‘I don’t blame you; if I were you, I’d try to kill me, too.’_

He’s making a face. Disgusted. That’s the word for it. He looks disgusted with me, and I try wiping some of the blood off of my face, but I feel like all that accomplishes is just making my other hand dirty. I move towards him, wishing that he would look at me some other way. I might not fault him for looking at me like that, but I don’t have to enjoy it, either. I want him to look at me the way he looked at the girl in the memory, like he didn’t find fault with me. Like he doesn’t mind the way I look.

I really like the way he looks, though. His eyes are sharp and shiny, just like the thing I’d picked up in the hallway outside, but a little different. _‘A knife,’_ the word comes to me. Sharp like a knife. It fits. I like it.

I like the rest of his face, too, but not in a creepy way. At least, I don’t think it’s in a creepy way. He doesn’t look good enough to eat—no human does to me, actually—but he does look good. Black hair and black clothes, but his skin looks so smooth and pale and clean. He’s short, though. He wasn’t in the memory. I get closer and take a breath through my nose, because I’m curious as to what his heartbeat smells like right now. It’s not the sour stench of fear, but it’s not exactly a good smell. It smells like how I feel sometimes when I think about not existing anymore. That’s the only way I can put it.

I wish I had more words.

And then he says something. Quiet and bitter, “Fuck off.” I know those words mean something bad, and I open my mouth without thinking to respond with a short word I always hear people scream when they don’t want something, but all that comes out is the first letter in a feeble slur.

Air that I don’t even need whooshes from my lungs when he kicks me right below the chest, and I stumble back. It didn’t hurt, but I still feel bad. I don’t want him to kick me. I realize that he probably thinks that I want to hurt him, and I stretch out a hand to try and show him that I’m trying to be harmless. The memories flash by in my brain, and my eyes zero in on his hair as my mind thinks about the way he’d been cutting it. I wonder why he’d been cutting it. It looks nice, though. Clean. Soft. Mine is so dirty, and I wonder what his feels like.

My fingers find the back of his head, brushing against the short hair with a whisper of sound. It does feel soft. But then he makes that face again. Disgusted. I don’t want him to be disgusted. I wish I had a word to take that look away. I wish I had the word for feeling bad about doing something wrong. I wish I had the word for the way he looks. I wish I could introduce myself, tell him that I don’t want to hurt him, tell him my name.

Name.

I try to make my mouth move in the way that the girl’s mouth had moved in her memory. “L-Lee—”

His eyes widen, and he’s looking at me, and it’s not disgust so maybe I’m doing something right.

“Le—vi…”

His mouth drops open, and the word for this new expression comes to me. Shock. He looks shocked. Or astonished. That’s another word, one that sounds better than shocked. I like that. And I like the way his name fits in my mouth. I like it a lot.

“Levi.”


	2. See the Signs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The corpse stares at him, the skin of its forehead puckering as it furrows its brows. It looks like it’s thinking, and Levi reminds himself of Dr. Jaeger’s words: Corpses look human. They are not. They do not think, they do not bleed.
> 
> Levi frowns. ‘If they don’t think, then what the hell is going on here?’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eren has his Titan hair in this story btw because I couldn't stop doodling zombie!Eren with Titan hair in my math class. Ask my friend, she laughed at me about it. But c'mon, I have a mighty need for Eren with Titan hair, like, every waking moment of my life tbh.

_‘A corpse just talked to me.’_

Levi wets his lips, tries to swallow past the dry lump in his throat. His gaze flicks around, but there’s not much in his field of vision besides the face of the corpse, its eyes an abnormally luminescent shade of green. Like malachite, glinting, and looking at him in a way that seems almost expectant.

_‘Hanji would have a fuckin’ field day with this.’_

He wonders if he might be going into shock. Or maybe if he’s actually dead and just entirely missed the whole ‘getting eaten’ part of the deal. Numbly, he leans back as much as he can, wrinkling his nose—the corpse smells really fucking terrible, and all he can think about right now is how much he wants it to get away from him. Impulsively, he snaps, “Quit touchin’ me.”

The hand at the back of his head clumsily falls away, and the corpse blinks at him.

A stunned breath hisses through his clenched teeth, and Levi gingerly prods at the corpse’s leg with the toe of his boot. “Back,” he orders, and he doesn’t know whether to laugh or flip shit when it actually listens, moving away from him in an uncoordinated little shuffle. He settles for drawing in a heavy, incredulous breath through his nose, lifting his hands off the counter and bringing them up to grip his hair, tugging at the strands to give his mind something to focus on instead of spiraling off into a million directions of thought, all of them equally confused.

“The fuck are you?” he mutters. He honestly wonders if it’s going to answer him.

Levi watches closely as the corpse opens its mouth again, but all that comes out is an incoherent gurgle. He narrows his eyes at it, wondering if maybe he should just _try_ to dart around it and make a break back for the walls, but then it makes another sound.

“Mm.”

 _‘That is_ not _what I wanna hear from you,’_ he thinks, a vicious sneer on his face as he raises his arms to strike at it. But then—

“L-Levi.”

He freezes. “What the fuck,” he whispers, hands balling into fists so tight they practically tremble with the force of the movement. “What _are_ you?” he repeats, louder this time. He wants an answer.

The corpse stares at him, the skin of its forehead puckering as it furrows its brows. It looks like it’s thinking, and Levi reminds himself of Dr. Jaeger’s words: _Corpses look human. They are not. They do not think, they do not bleed._

Levi frowns. _‘If they don’t think, then what the hell is going on here?’_

“Levi,” the corpse repeats, and it sounds almost insistent.

From somewhere outside, there is another clatter, and Levi stiffens while the corpse turns around and stares at the wide-open door. It makes an odd sound low in its throat, and then it turns its head to glance back at Levi over its shoulder. Levi scowls at it, hissing, “What?” and wondering exactly when the universe decided that his life needed to be more fucked up than it already was to begin with.

The corpse lifts a hand and points at its back, and Levi blinks in realization. _‘The knife_ ,’ he thinks dumbly, reaching out to wrap his fingers around the handle and pulling it out with a grotesque squish. _‘What kind of dumbass corpse gives me my weapon back? I could kill it right now.’_

There’s more noise from outside, and it’s clearly coming down the hall towards this room. A moment goes by. Another.

 _‘Maybe I’m insane. Finally lost my goddamn marbles,’_ Levi thinks when it becomes obvious that he’s not going to kill the corpse. Not yet. It, however, is completely oblivious to the inner conflict that had just been happening; it shambles forward, back hunched and shoulders drawn up. It keeps making that strange, low sound, and it takes Levi a moment to realize that the corpse is _growling_ at whatever is beyond the door.

It’s another corpse, and Levi grimaces when he catches full sight of it lumbering through the doorway. It’s huge, easily twice the size of this teenage undead anomaly that’s standing in front of him like it can protect him somehow. Levi doesn’t waste any time to find out whether it can or not; he adjusts his grip on the knife and shifts his weight back on his right leg, calculating the distance and the force he’ll need to throw to land an accurate hit.

The huge corpse ducks and charges forward the second Levi lets the blade fly, and it buries itself in the doorframe as he swears aloud and leaps up onto a countertop. He whips back around just in time to hear the abnormal corpse let out a roar that would shake windows if there were any in the room as it jumps and swings its fist, landing a crushing blow to the underside of the huge corpse’s jaw.

Levi freezes, mouth dropping into a little ‘oh’ of surprise. As far as he knows, in the half-decade since the outbreak, there has never been a single record anywhere of corpses fighting each other. “What _are_ you?” he hisses once more before he jumps from countertop to countertop, searching for a weapon that isn’t spent. This strange corpse can’t die yet; not until he gets some answers.

He spots an M9 on the ground next to a mangled body that looks like it used to be Auruo, and he grimaces and forces down the bile that rises in his throat. _‘Later,’_  he tells himself, making his way back into the aisle and taking aim at the back of the huge corpse’s head. _‘Think about it later.’_

The gun barely bucks in his hands when he fires until it’s spent, and his target goes down with a loud groan that doesn’t stop. Levi narrows his eyes—he’s sure he killed it—and then he groans himself when he realizes that the noise is coming from under the body. “You fuckin’ serious right now?” he spits, dropping the gun and stomping over to it, where the abnormal corpse is pinned under the dead weight. “Really?”

It gives a pitiful grunt and looks up at him with pleading eyes, and he scowls. His skin is prickling with discomfort, and he knows that it would be easy to leave it there and haul ass back to the walls. In a normal situation, he’d be gone; he’d look around for the spoils of his dead squad, take what he can—weapons included—and head for home. Tell the higher-ups what happened. Accept his pay, take a bitterly cold shower, and not sleep at all because he’s certain that if he closes his eyes, all he’ll see is the blood splattered over these once-white walls.

But that’s assuming he even manages to make it back to Sina, and after he makes an attempt at coming to terms with the fact that he really doesn’t have anything more to lose, Levi hauls the dead body off the abnormal corpse.

 “Well?” he says once it’s standing, watching him intently once more. At its owlish blink, Levi throws out his arms. “What now?” he mutters. “The fuck are you? The hell are you doing, talking and fighting your own kind and shit? What the hell?” His voice is terribly uneven, rising until it cracks, and he coughs and clears his throat in irritation before he stares at the corpse, waiting for an answer.

“Levi,” it says dumbly, and then it looks around the room before ambling towards the door. Honestly seeing no other course of action to take, Levi wearily follows it.

It leads him to an overturned metal cart, medical tools scattered on the floor around it. A tug on his wrist has him whipping his arm away and turning to see the abnormal corpse holding out a scalpel. It opens its mouth and stutters, “T-t-take.”

Levi frowns. “That ain’t gonna do shit if we run into more corpses.”

It looks confused for a moment before it pockets the scalpel and crouches down, sorting through the tools. Levi blinks hard, wondering if he’d really made the right choice by staying behind when it speaks again.

“T-take,” it says, but its voice almost lilts at the end, and Levi thinks, ‘ _Jesus shit, it’s figuring out how to ask questions.’_

He takes a look at what it’s holding—gauze, of all things—and he sighs and shakes his head. “Never mind. Just pick up a lot,” he tells it, crouching down to grab the scalpels. They’ll be piss-poor projectiles, but it’s better than nothing. The corpse looks almost pleased, and when they’ve gathered up all they can, Levi holds one and stows the rest. “Now what?” he asks.

It’s ridiculous, it’s insane, but Levi knows by now that the only thing he can do is accept the circumstances as they are. A Scout lives by the mantra of ‘shoot first, ask questions later,’ but instead of a gun, all he’s got is a weird-ass corpse that knows his name, hasn’t killed him, has tried to protect him, and has even armed him.

At this point, he might as well throw whatever caution he has left to the wind and see if this decision is one that gets him out alive, because that is all that matters right now. Staying alive is a priority.

They make it out a back entrance without encountering any more corpses, and the abnormal constantly looks over its shoulder like it’s checking to make sure Levi is still there. Every time it does, Levi glowers at it and snaps, “Eyes forward.”

He almost wants to laugh when the corpse looks apologetic and turns back around.

As it leads him further away from the city and into what he recognizes as one of the final neighborhoods that had been evacuated in the suburbs, Levi can feel the stress setting in. The adrenaline and high-pressure need for survival has faded, but his heart is still racing—hasn’t ever stopped, really—and he’s barely processing the world around him, just blindly following the abnormal corpse down a cracked road littered with broken glass. The roads are always littered with broken glass. The dying rays of the sun glitter off of them as it sinks beyond the horizon.

 _‘I don’t know what the hell I’m doing,’_ Levi thinks numbly, trailing after the corpse as it shambles up the steps of a little abandoned house on the corner of the street. He glances around, knuckles bone-white from the force of his grip on the scalpel, and then turns back to see the abnormal corpse push open the door and walk inside. Something, maybe a gut instinct or sheer lunacy, makes him follow.

The inside of the house is dark, but more importantly than that, it’s silent save for the sound of his own breathing. He glances over and meets the abnormal corpse’s shining, wide-eyed gaze and then takes a look at their surroundings.

The house shows signs of having been prepared against the outbreak prior to evacuation, if the heavily boarded-up windows are anything to go by. Levi walks to the door and turns the lock before grabbing a short bookcase near the doorway and hauling over to use as a barricade. He can feel the abnormal corpse watching him the entire time, silent, and it makes his hair stand on end. He turns to it and, in a voice that’s far calmer than he actually feels, asks, “Any other entrances?”

It stares at him for a bit before slowly shaking its head and moving through an archway, into the hall. Feeling more helpless than he has in a long time—and that’s saying something—Levi follows it, the grip he has on his weapon never easing.

There’s a metal door on one wall, bolted shut. The abnormal corpse unlocks it with an amount of coordination that would be surprising, if Levi felt that he had the capacity to be surprised by anything at all anymore. The door slides open quietly, revealing a dark staircase that leads down into a basement.

Staring into the blackness, for the first time, Levi doubts. And he’s furious.

Without a word, Levi wrenches the corpse’s arm and throws it against the wall, unforgiving fingers closing around its neck and weak blade hovering right above one of its eyes, poised to strike.

“You think I’m stupid?” he spits at it, voice shaking; he’s so out of control right now that it’s pathetic and it might just get him killed, but he doesn’t give a fuck. This is too much. His squad is dead, ripped apart right in front of him, and now he’s followed a freak of nature out to the suburbs because yeah, he _must_ be stupid for ever having thought it was a good decision, and the only way he’s not regretting it is if he gets one more kill in.

The corpse stares at him, completely placid. Levi watches in dazed bewilderment as it raises a hand and closes cold, sticky fingers over his wrist. It shuts its eyes, a muted whine sounding low in its throat before it opens its mouth and whispers, “Levi.”

A dull ache begins to beat against the insides of his temples, and Levi lets what feels like an eternity go by before he lowers the weapon and releases the corpse. He scowls, making to head down the stairs first, but a soft tug on his shirt stops him. The corpse watches him solemnly before deliberately moving to take the steps first, its footfalls loud and clumsy.

Levi clenches his jaw and steps onto the landing, turning and shutting the surprisingly heavy door. There’s a bar, he notices, that he could use to keep it shut against anything on the outside that wants to claw its way in.

 _‘Or,’_ his mind supplies grimly, _‘Trap in anything that wants to get out.’_

Maybe if the circumstances were different, maybe if his mind wasn’t probably fraying at the edges, he would have thought about it more. As it is, Levi grabs the latch and slides it down, barring the door. He gives it a hard shove to confirm it’s secure and then heads down the stairs without looking back, the darkness swallowing him up.

~~~

The first thing Levi says to me when he comes down the stairs is, “If you touch me again, I’ll rip your fuckin’ arm off.”

And then he sits down on the bottom step, knees up and arms folded across them, and bows his head, silent. I watch him for a minute or two, just to see if maybe he’ll look up at me and say something else—hopefully something that sounds less angry—but he doesn’t.

It’s really dark down here, but that doesn’t make much of a difference in my sight, and I can see the outline of his body on the stairs. His breathing sounds normal, but his heartbeat smells… Well, I don’t know how it smells, but it makes my chest hurt and my eyes feel like they’re stinging again.

I blink. His shoulders are shaking.

I try to be quiet when I walk over to a shelf on the wall nearby and take down a lamp and the box of matches that I know is there. There’s a couple, actually—I’ve been through the neighborhood a couple of times, breaking into the empty houses and taking whatever looks like it might be useful or entertaining—but this one is the only one that’s in nearly perfect condition. Maybe he’ll feel better if it’s not so dark down here; there aren’t any windows, so having light down here is okay—not that a lot of corpses are moving around in the suburbs anyway. I move back towards him, and he growls, “I _said_ don’t fuckin’ touch me.” His voice sounds different, like it’s hard for him to talk.

 _‘Tell him you don’t want to hurt him_ ,’ I think, my mouth opening and closing as I try to form the shapes of the words with my lips. It feels uncomfortable, and I lick them and taste the blood that’s still staining my skin from when I fed. I shake my head; I don’t like that, and I feel very bad about it. It makes me try harder to talk to him, and tell him that I don’t want to hurt him.

I just want to keep him safe. I think I need to keep him safe.

“Levi,” I start, because his name is just about the only thing I know I can say without screwing up, and it seems like the best way to get his attention. “D-Don’t…” I manage, and his head moves, but he doesn’t look up. “Don’t… hu—urt.” I shake the box of matches and hold them and the lamp out while I take one step closer. The shaking stops a little bit, but I see his shoulders freeze and draw up. Uncomfortable. Stiff. He says something, but I don’t understand it.

I try again. “Don’t hurt. K-K-Keep… Keep you… S-Safe.” And then I blink, mildly startled, because that actually made sense.

Levi doesn’t say anything in response to that, and he doesn’t look at me either. But he’s not shaking anymore, and I take a quiet breath through my nose. His heartbeat still smells bad—I don’t like it—but the stench isn’t as powerful as it was a moment ago, and I think he listened to me. I take another step in his direction and set the lamp and matches on the floor in front of him as carefully as I can, and then I turn around and make my way to the far end of the basement.

I may be a corpse, but I’m not stupid. I know he doesn’t want me to bother him. I sit down on the floor, back turned to him, and something in my mind tells me that if I were with anyone else, that would be a really stupid decision. Come to think of it, it’s probably still a stupid decision anyway because Levi is upset, and he’s also a special human that’s supposed to kill corpses like me.

I noticed the marks on his skin earlier—wings printed on the insides of his wrists. All the humans generally want to kill us corpses, but I know there’s a special set of humans who kill corpses because they’re meant to. They’re the only ones that ever come into the city, and they always wear the wings—sometimes on their arms, sometimes on their legs, sometimes on their back. But they always have them.

I like looking at those wings. They make my chest feel funny when I think about them.

After a while, Levi moves, but I force myself not to turn around and look. If he gets closer, I will, but only to make sure that he’s not going to try and hurt me. When I hear the crackle and hiss of a match being lit, the flame casting a soft glow over everything as he lights the lamp, I feel a little better. _‘Relaxed_ , _’_ I think. I feel relaxed about the fact that he hasn’t tried to hurt me again.

“The fuck is this?” he rasps, and I finally turn to see him standing up, lamp held aloft to illuminate the room. I don’t really know what he means, and I don’t think he wants me to answer—not that I know how to—so I just watch him move around.

I’ve collected a lot of things since I became a corpse. I don’t really remember how it happened, though. I remember my mother. I remember I had her, and then I lost her, but I keep her necklace with her picture in it, and that’s all I really need. The rest of the things down here are just things I find that I like. They fascinate me, I guess. There’s a huge floor-to-ceiling shelf that covers half the length of a wall. I filled it with books I took from a big building in the city, back when I remembered how to read. A couple of them are mostly picture books, though, so I can still look at those when I feel like it.

There’s other shelves mounted on the walls, too, covered with so many things that I really don’t remember all of what’s there. Besides the books, though, there’s a shelf of my favorite things. A box I took from upstairs is one of them, actually. It’s filled with little sparkling rings and necklaces. It smells like the flowers that grow everywhere when the cold season melts away and the sun comes out from behind the clouds in the daytime when I open it, but it’s a little artificial. I like it, though. The smell lasts longer than the flowers do, but I worry that it’ll go away too, and so I only open the box when I don’t feel very good. Usually it’s after I hunt.

Levi’s walking around, looking at the things cluttered up everywhere. He stops in front of one shelf and stares for a while at a big glass ball that I picked up a few houses down; it’s pretty, filled with water and tiny glittering bits that swirl around when you shake it. There’s a little person inside of it that never moves, just always stands there looking happy. I have a couple of those glass balls. Levi reaches out, and I tense up a little because I think he’s going to pick it up and I don’t want him to drop it—but he just runs a finger over the dusty surface and frowns. Then he looks at me.

“You got a lotta shit down here.”

I don’t have any words that can answer him, so I just nod. He stares at me like he’s not sure what I am, and I kind of want to nod again, because I agree with him. I don’t really know what I am either. I’m supposed to be a corpse, but corpses are supposed to eat people, and I don’t like doing that. I feel guilty at the thought of the piece of brain matter I have, shoved deep in my pocket.

Without trying to be too obvious, I slip a hand down to cover it. I don’t want Levi to look and find it. I think he’d be mad at me. I wouldn’t blame him, but that doesn’t mean that I’m okay with it happening.

“Have you been…” He pauses, mouth twisting. “…Living here?”

“Yes,” I blurt out, and then I freeze because I hadn’t meant to say that on purpose. I really didn’t. But Levi’s words made sense, and then I had a word that made sense, and now he’s staring at me like he’s angry, but I think he’s just confused. His face kind of always looks angry, brows slanted down and mouth in a harsh line.

His eyes narrow, and in a low voice that sounds like something scratchy is in his throat, he says, “I gotta know what you are, corpse. I didn’t follow you out here cause I _wanted_ to hole up in some filthy fuckin’ basement filled with God-knows-what kinda shit, alright? I want some damn answers, and you’re the only corpse I’ve ever heard of talkin’, so you’re gonna give ‘em to me.”

I wilt a little bit. I don’t like it when he calls me a corpse. I don’t want him to call me a corpse.

I wish I could remember my name.

“What are you?” he asks, and I’m about to shrug when he snaps, “No, fuckin’ stupid question. If a corpse can’t think, it sure as shit ain’t gonna be able to answer that.” Levi seems like he’s talking more to himself than to me, so I stay quiet and still while I watch him move away from my shelves and start walking in circles, eyes on the ground. For the first time, I notice that he’s still holding the weapon I gave him back in the city, and I watch the way it shines in the light.

“Did you bring me here cause you were gonna wait to kill me?” he asks, and a hurt noise escapes my throat. I don’t remember the word for this, so all I can do is shake my head wildly back and forth like an animal and hope he believes me. He’s quiet for a bit, pausing. “No,” he murmurs, and I blink. I think that’s the word.

“No,” I repeat. When the silence stretches, I add, “D-Don’t hurt.”

He frowns. “How the hell can you talk?”

I blink and shrug. I don’t understand that question; I’ve never heard other corpses say anything besides grunts and other noises like that, but I’m not exactly like all the other corpses. Not for the first time, I wish that I was both not a corpse at all and more like a corpse at the same time. At least then I wouldn’t feel so confused.

Levi looks like he’s thinking hard about something, and he keeps looking me over, up and down, carefully. I remember the girl’s memory that had rushed through my head back in the city—the way that his eyes had studied her. They’re looking at me like that now. Studying. But I don’t feel completely happy about that, because I know that he won’t think of me the same way he must have thought of her. She was a human. Those other people all were human. They were probably… close to him.

_‘Friends.’_

Yeah. They were probably his friends.

I feel like, somehow, he knows what I’m thinking of. He walks over and sits down in front of me, not close enough to touch, though. I watch him set the lamp down between us and cross his legs, hands coming to rest on his kneecaps. He has small hands, I notice. Long fingers, though. I can see them clearly in the light. They’re not as dirty as mine.

“You don’t have any bullet holes,” he says, and my eyes snap up to his face. He’s not looking at me, not really; his eyes are on my shirt. “No wounds at all.” I look down to see what he’s seeing. Blood, yeah. Some dirt. I look back at him, and now he’s watching me, eyes sharp and flinty in the glow of the lamplight. I swallow, not knowing why I feel the need to.

“You didn’t fight anyone on my squad,” he says. It sounds almost like he’s asking me if I really did, but the words don’t match. His voice hitches on the last two words. I try to copy what I’ve seen him doing—narrowing my eyes, because maybe it’ll help me see him better, although I already have good vision. Even if it were dark, I’d be able to see him clearly.

“Don’t hurt.”

He glares. “I ain’t gonna hurt you unless you try and hurt me.”

I shake my head. “Don’t hurt… _you_ ,” I stress, and then I lift my hand—he watches the movement with wary eyes, grip on the weapon tightening—and point at him. “Don’t hurt Levi.”

“You won’t hurt me,” he says disbelievingly. But those are the right words, and I nod.

“Won’t hurt you,” I tell him, and I want him to believe it; I really want him to believe it. It’s not just him. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want to be this way. I don’t want to be a corpse.

But I don’t think I could say all that anyway, so I don’t even try. I’m okay with just sitting there, watching him watch me through the lamplight, feeling less alone than I have in a very long time.

Part of me maybe thinks that I wouldn’t really mind if he did end up killing me. At least I would have the memory of being near someone again clear in my mind. If I think of that, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

I wonder if that’s what humans think about before they die. People they like being close to.

I think lots of things about humans are confusing, and I think lots of things about corpses are confusing, but it seems to me like thinking about people you like right before you die is something that makes sense. ‘ _Maybe it’s something we have in common.’_

I like that thought. Maybe it’s something we have in common.

~~~

Levi has given up on trying to talk to the corpse, leaving it on the floor with the lamp while he searches the basement. It’s partially because the corpse doesn’t have the same level of coherency that a human does, and although it’s admittedly astounding that it’s coherent at all, it feels like trying to talk to a toddler, and patience is something that Levi has in short supply these days if he even has any at all.

It hadn’t killed his squad, though. That’s something that sticks in his mind. It had been there, yes, but it hadn’t directly caused any of their deaths. As a Scout, death is something common in the world nowadays, even more so than it had been before the outbreak. Back then, it was still considered a tragedy when people died young—something to mourn for days. Now, however, people are prepared for it. Everyone’s aware of it.

He’s been in squads before that he’d been the only survivor of. And while this squad had been his first that he’d led, it still didn’t change the fact that Scouts were trained to be prepared for death at all times. _‘Every time you leave the walls is a time that you might not come back. All you can hope for is a noble death,’_ is something that instructors had frequently repeated to the recruits in training. It’s something he’s repeated to himself in the long nights before a mission. It doesn’t help him sleep any better—nothing does, short of medication that nobody’s been able to get their hands on in a long while—but there’s an odd kind of comfort in truth, and he takes it for what it is.

Levi knows he should feel exhausted, and there is a sort of tiredness burrowing into the marrow of his bones, but he also knows that he won’t sleep even if he wanted to try. Abnormal it may be, but there’s still a corpse down here with him.

He casts a surreptitious glance over his shoulder at it. It hasn’t moved, hunched over the lamp and staring at it intently. Its eyes are wide with almost child-like wonder, and Levi honestly doesn’t know how to feel as he watches it. Every combative instinct that’s been drilled into him is telling him that it’s a monster. It eats humans. It must be killed—they all must be killed, for the sake of humanity.

But there’s something about it that unnerves him. Something not right.

It doesn’t act like any corpse he’s ever encountered before, and that _bothers_ him. He scoffs at his own irritation, and the corpse twitches at the sound, gaze darting up to meet his. Levi almost wants to cringe; it looks at him funny. Not like he’s food, but… something else.

He can’t put his finger on it, but it’s not normal, and he actually finds himself wishing that Hanji were here. She would know how to handle this kind of situation far better than he can, with her fascination and dedicated research about corpses.

 _‘Shitty Four-Eyes,’_ he thinks, catching himself wishing for home. When he realizes that the corpse is still staring at him, he snaps, “The fuck do you want?”

It glances away from him and shrugs, but its eyes dart back over when it thinks he’s not looking. Levi frowns at it and mutters, “I don’t suppose you have anything that a human could use. This—” He waves a hand at the messy shelves. “—ain't exactly top-priority stuff.”

The corpse looks over by the stairs where he’d left his bag, and Levi shakes his head. “I ain’t talkin’ medical supplies. I mean shit like food. Water. Stuff to keep me alive,” he grouses like it can understand him.

He watches with skepticism as the corpse stands up and shuffles over to a far corner of the room. There’s a large, blanket-covered lump in the corner, and he’s startled when the corpse tugs off the cover to reveal exactly what he’d asked for. There’s probably more than fifteen cases of bottled water stacked on each other, along with what looks like an entire crate of non-perishable foods.

“What the fuck,” he breathes, walking over and kneeling down next to all the items. He tugs aside the crate and sees another, smaller cardboard box. He flips it open and stares at it in absolute disbelief, concluding that this is definitely the moment where his own life cannot get possibly become any stranger.

“What kind of fuckin’ corpse has soap in their goddamn basement?” he asks, talking more to himself than to the corpse. He picks up a purple bottle with a long-faded label and flips open the cap to take a cautious sniff. His eyes widen when he realizes that he’s holding body wash—actual body wash that hasn’t been produced in half a goddamn decade and is a far cry from the basic industrial soap that’s all they can manage to produce in the walls. Again, he doesn’t know whether to laugh or flip shit.

“I—”

Levi is so startled that he drops the bottle and wheels around to look at the corpse; it’s standing over his shoulder, peering down at him curiously. It freezes at his movement, mouth open.

Levi narrows his eyes and waits.

The corpse swallows reflexively. Then, haltingly, “I… t-took it.”

“… You took it.”

A brief pause, and then a barely perceptible nod. There’s a strange sort of clarity in its eyes.

“Where did you take it from?” Levi asks, hardly willing to believe that it will even understand him, much less answer him. The corpse grunts a little and then glances at the ceiling, pointing up. “You took all of this stuff from here?”

The corpse stares at him, and Levi watches its brows furrow under that long, matted hair flopping over its face. “O-O-Oth—er… Other h-homes.”

“You took it from other homes,” Levi repeats dubiously. He can hardly believe what he’s hearing.

The corpse works its throat for a moment before saying again, “I took it… f-fr—om other… Other homes.”

Levi feels a surge of incredulity and wonders vaguely if this is what Hanji must feel like every time she comes back from a mission babbling about her observations. Suddenly, he wishes he’d paid a little bit more attention to her every time she went on about her theories about corpses and makes a mental note to listen the next time he sees her.

If he sees her again.

He brushes away the thought like he would an irritating pest and observes the corpse carefully, really making an effort to study it this time. Again, he notes its youth. It’s a teenager, younger than him. He guesses maybe fifteen or sixteen, but it’s hard to get a decent look at its face with all the grime and its hair constantly in the way.

And then he takes what he’s been taught about corpses and compares it. _‘Corpses do not think.’_ Wrong, he decides, because the past few hours have been sufficient enough evidence that this corpse not only thinks, it talks. He’s not willing to consider the possibility that it feels—just accepting that it can successfully understand him—to a degree—and communicate is overwhelming enough to deal with.

 _‘Corpses are monsters.’_ Again, wrong. Whatever this thing is, it’s not a monster. It feeds, he knows—the blood all over it is proof of that—but it hadn’t directly attacked anyone. _‘And,’_ Levi recalls, _‘Even when I attacked it, it didn’t retaliate.’_ He blinks hard. _‘It defended me. Fought a member of its own kind. Shit.’_

He’s struggling with this, he really is. In mere hours, everything that he’d known—everything that he’d been taught to believe in the past five years—is as good as the shattered glass on the streets. It’s meaningless here.

It’s terrifying. He forces himself not to show how much of a shock this is, how much it affects him. Levi doubts that the corpse would recognize it even if he did, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is he’s faced with the biggest anomaly in the past half-decade, besides the original corpses.

He’d gone out on a simple medical supply raid.

 _‘Fuck the Vicodin,’_ he thinks, straightening up and walking up to the corpse. He stands toe-to-toe with it, and it doesn’t back away—clearly, whatever it is, it has no concept of personal space. He wrinkles his nose at it, because it really does smell terrible, but despite the fact that his skin is crawling with the motion, he raises a hand and gingerly sweeps its long bangs back out of its face.

Its eyes are clear, looking back at him just as intently as he is looking at it. _‘I found something a million times more valuable,’_ he realizes, hand dropping back down to his side. The corpse’s gaze follows the movement.

Levi frowns; the term ‘corpse’ doesn’t really seem like it’s applicable anymore. Yes, it’s still technically a corpse, but it’s more than that, somehow. It’s a shot in the dark, he knows, but he figures that if a corpse can communicate—if it has the capacity to think, maybe it has the capacity to remember. So, quietly but firmly, he asks, “You got a name?”

For a moment, Levi thinks it’s ignoring him, its eyes still on the hand he’d touched it with. Almost reluctantly, it seems, the corpse raises its gaze until it’s watching his mouth. Again, Levi repeats the question. A moment goes by.

And then it speaks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -whispers- Most of the time I don't know what I'm doing -dances off into the night-  
> P.S. I'm so fucking sorry I'm shit with replies I promise I promise I PROMISE I'LL RESPOND THIS TIME TO ANY COMMENTS. Life has just been crazy and I hate it but I'll be better, I swear! -hugs you all tight- Thank you so much for reading!


	3. Little Patience

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Do you hate me?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yELLS EDITING IS A PAINFUL PROCESS GOD ALMIGHTY I HATE IT. Editing is the Devil. I second-guessed literally everything I wrote but idk this is the end result and I think I'm happy with it like ???? ??? ? NaNoWriMo is just a difficult time haha and thank shit it's over. I DO have 50000+ words written for this thing, but most of the stuff written in NaNo is like 12% awesome and 88% stuff that gets pulled out of your ass just to make the wordcount hAHA. Never fear, though, it'll all be up eventually, once I edit it until I'm happy and it's coherent. THANK YOU FOR PUTTING UP WITH ME. I'll keep working on this in conjunction with Keep Your Head Up, but this will probably more of a side thing while KYHU will be the main focus. I love working on this just as much, though, so don't worry about it being forgotten; I COULD NEVER FORGET. You're all lovely and I hope you enjoy this update.

He asks me for my name.

It’s been a long time since someone’s asked me for my name.

I stare at Levi’s mouth as it moves around the question, half aware that I’m probably disgusting him with how creepy I’m being again. But I really can’t help it. There’s something about him, something about the way that his lips—thin and harsh, in an unforgiving line almost the entire time he’s been around me—shape itself to fit around the sounds that make up the words that make up the simplest question he’s asked me yet. So much simpler than, ‘What are you?’

I wish I knew how to make my mouth work like that. He makes talking look so easy.

I wish I had an answer for him, but I don’t. I feel stupid, and maybe I have an excuse—I’m a corpse, after all—but it still doesn’t seem like a very good one. I bet my mom would have remembered, if she were still here. Yeah.

My mom would know.

“What?”

I flinch at the sound of his voice, sharp like the crack of a weapon in the silence. I look down at him, my hands twitching at my sides; I feel nervous. He’s looking at me funny, his brows drawn down just like the corners of his mouth, sharp lines of what looks like dislike. What did I do? I don’t understand.

“The hell did you say?” Levi asks warily, and I watch his fingers curl tighter around the shiny little blade that he’s been holding in his hand the entire time he’s been here. “You got a mom?”

I blink, not understanding. “W-What…?” I copy him; he asks me that almost every single time _I_ do something that he doesn’t understand, and it’s a little strange for me to be asking him now. But I’m confused.

He watches me, eyes keen and suspicious. He doesn’t hold the blade up against me like before, but his arm flexes, grip strong, unwavering. “You said your mom would know.”

There’s a moment of silence—guarded stiffness on his end, and shock on mine. I didn’t mean to say anything; I didn’t even register that I’d mentioned my mom out loud. But I guess I had, and now Levi’s watching me with a dangerous look in his eyes. My own gaze flicks back down to the knife in his hand. It’s not in a position to attack, and maybe it’s some sort of misguided hope that makes me think that he doesn’t really want to hurt me, maybe he doesn’t want to distrust me.

That’s what makes me look him in the eye and tell him, soft and, surprisingly, not a bit stilted, “My mom is dead.”

Levi’s face is expressionless, but I manage to catch the slightest widening of his eyes that would have been unnoticeable if I hadn’t been watching him so closely. His hand relaxes, just a little bit. “You remember your mom?” He sounds something close to surprised.

It’s my want for understanding—my want for him to stop looking at me like he doesn’t trust me—that makes me bring up a hand to clumsily grope beneath the neck of my tattered shirt. He stares at me when I tug up the thin, gold chain and expose the egg-shaped necklace that holds her picture inside.

Levi reaches out, but I flinch and step back immediately. “No!” I say, and it comes out louder and more panicked than I meant it to be. He pauses, arm in the air, and he looks at me strangely. I nervously shuffle back, but I don’t look away from him. I need him to see that I just want to _show_ him the locket, but I don’t want him to touch it.

My fingers are stiff in their movements—they always are, really, but this is really the first time in a long while that I’ve paid attention to that. It bothers me, fumbling with the little clasp; it should be easy to flick it open and expose the picture inside, the picture that, now that I’ve thought about it, I really want to see. I need to see it. I don’t ever want to forget what my mother looks like, and day after day, there’s always at least one moment where I worry that I will start to forget her, and I’ll be so far gone that I won’t even remember that I always wear a memento around my neck.

If I could just get it open, though.

“Hey.” Levi’s voice is stern, but only when it reaches my ears do I realize that it’s cut off another sound—the sound of me pathetically growling my frustration with the necklace. Now I’m the one who pauses, and my hand falls away, down to my side, defeated. The locket hits me in the sternum with a barely audible thump. I pretend that the ache in my chest comes from that.

“Hey,” Levi repeats, the tail end of the word haltingly dropping off into silence. “…Kid,” he says to me after a while, and I realize that the break between his words had come from him not knowing what to call me. I peek down at him through my dirty hair.

It’s not my name, but it’s better than being called a corpse.

“I-I-It was… he—ers,” I tell him, forcing the words out. It’s hard, and I don’t know if it’s more because talking is difficult in general, or because I’m talking about her. “Inside, there’s…”

Levi’s studying me closely, and his stare makes my chest feel tight; a breath that I don’t need rushes from my lungs when he asks, quietly, “Can I look?”

My hand flies up and closes around the locket protectively. Naturally. We both blink and look at it, and I wonder how I moved like that with so little effort. I don’t want to try to open the locket again, though; I’m worried that I’ll just get frustrated with myself when I can’t work my fingers the right way. And even though I bet Levi can open it, no problem, and as much as I want to see my mom’s face...

My jumbled thoughts and worries break off when Levi takes a step back and crosses his arms over his chest. It’s only now that I have space do I notice how he’d sort of been crowding me, and I’m an odd mix of relieved and disappointed at the distance between us.

“I ain’t gonna break it, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he almost snaps, but despite his obvious exasperation, he doesn’t make a move in my direction. He stands back, waiting for me to do or say something first.

That makes me feel good, and my mouth pulls just a little bit wider at that, even though I don’t think that he’s actively trying to be considerate. I stop the stretch of my lips and let them relax back into their normal, slack position when his eyes widen a bit. “What?” I ask. I’m confused, but he doesn’t respond right away. My brows knit; that’s the word that people say when they’re confused, right? I know he heard me say it, but I repeat it anyway, just in case.

He gives me a slight shake of his head. “Nothing. Ain’t ever seen a corpse smile before, that’s all,” he mutters, bemused.

I blink. “Smile?” I feel like I should know the word, but it doesn’t click into place in my brain.

He frowns and raises a brow. “You were smiling. You know,” he drawls, and then I’m watching his lips close before they stretch and curl up. It’s a sarcastic expression; he must think I’m stupid for not knowing what a smile is.

But seeing it on his face… It makes me feel funny. My fingers give the locket an involuntary squeeze, and then I remember the little picture of my mom inside. I remember her long, brown hair, soft and shiny just like the look in her eyes. And then more comes back to me—the shape of her eyes, the shape of her whole face, how her mouth pulled up in a permanent, silent laugh, teeth showing. She smiles in the picture. She’s always smiling.

I forgot.

I’d forgotten my mom’s smile.

I can feel my face twist and crumple, and I can hear the low, pitiful whine that works its way out of my throat. It hurts. It hurts. I claw at the locket. I need to see. I can’t forget her. I miss her. I miss my mom.

“Kid—” Levi reaches out again, and I’m caught between pushing him away or pushing the locket at him. I choose neither, bowing my back as I curl into myself, fingers still fumbling. I hate these stupid corpse hands that don’t work right. I hate them.

“Kid, knock it off,” Levi snaps, and he drops the blade he’s been holding the entire time to shove at my shoulders; it hits the floor with a quiet clink.

“Open,” I manage thickly. I hold out the end of the locket, but I don’t take it off my neck; I don’t ever want to take it off. I just need him to open it, I just want to see my mom’s face. I’m shaking. My chest hurts.

“You want me to open the locket for you,” he repeats dubiously, one hand extended. Somehow, the fact that he didn’t just reach out right away and touch it gives me a weird sort of comfort. I’m not entirely sure way. Maybe it’s because, for whatever reason, he’s giving me what I’ve secretly been wishing for. He’s not treating me like a stupid, unfeeling corpse.

I don’t remember what it was like to not be treated like something to be feared. Frantically, I search my brain for the word I need now. I force down everything else—all the panic, and the worry, and even my anger at myself for forgetting something so important—and I find the word buried somewhere in a very faint calmness deep in the back of my mind. My hands are shaking as I uncurl my fingers and let the end of the locket rest in my open palm.

“Please,” I say, and again I marvel at how easily it comes out.

I watch him take the egg-shaped pendant in his hand, and I can’t stop the painful squeeze of apprehension in my stomach as he does. It’s not that I don’t trust him; obviously, I not only trust him, but I… Well, I don’t know. I felt something that was enough for me to approach him back at the hospital, something that was enough for me to lead him here and even not mind if he does end up killing me—for all I know, he still might.

But still. It’s my mom’s necklace, and I won’t feel okay until it’s back in my hand and I can see her face. I need to see her face. My gaze doesn’t leave his fingers, and I can’t help but pay attention to how delicate they look, unclasping the locket and flicking it open, even though the rest of him is thick, powerful muscle—dangerous-looking. Then again, I think he just has one of those presences that would make him look dangerous even if he weren’t an obvious example of a well-trained corpse hunter.

He drops the open pendant back in my palm, and I snatch it up and hold it at eye-level, the tightness in my chest dissipating as I stare at my mom’s face. A shuddering exhale trips through my lips, and I trace a finger in the air over her picture; I want to actually touch it, but I don’t because my fingers are dirty and I’m scared that I’d ruin it if I did.

I will myself to commit every detail of it to memory, my eyes lingering especially long on her smile. I feel guilty. I think that’s the word for it—the word for this awful, twisting feeling in the bottom of my stomach every time my brain reminds me that I’d forgotten what it looked like.

A funny, choking whimper sounds low in the back of my throat. I try not to feel ashamed.

After a while, Levi clears his throat, and I reluctantly lower the locket and look at him; I can’t quite meet his eyes. “How’d she die?”

I frown, just like I’ve seen him doing so much. My eyes flick down to his wrists, where I know the wings are. I don’t answer right away, but when I glance back up at him, he’s watching me expectantly, and I know that I can’t fake confusion. I can see something in his eyes that tells me he’s sure I understand him.

I wonder how I look to him. I wonder if there’s anything about me that he understands, and I decide that there’s probably not, considering I can hardly understand anything about myself most days.

“Kid,” Levi prompts, and I close my eyes. They’re stinging again. I like how he doesn’t call me a corpse. But I know that’s what I am now, even though I was human like him too, once. I’m a corpse, and that’s all I’m going to be for the rest of my existence. The edges of the locket bite into the skin of my hands as my grip tightens around it, and I work the words of my answer around in my head before I say them, because I want to say them right.

My voice, for once, doesn’t waver.

“Humans.”

~~~

Levi isn’t quite sure what kind of answer he’d been expecting, but he’s surprised enough to know that this was nowhere on his radar, not even close. He keeps his face as expressionless as he can, even though the kid’s got his eyes closed and wouldn’t see any shock he allows himself to show. He can’t shake the feeling that, somehow, being surprised would be unfair; death doesn’t discriminate. But still—

“Why would humans kill your mom?”

The kid looks at him then, eyes wide. “Why?” it repeats, but it’s questioning Levi’s confusion rather than musing over the word. Its throat works for a moment. “Th-That’s—what you d-do.”

Levi’s brow furrows, eyes narrowed in askance. “What?” The kid reaches out, and Levi jerks back instinctively, but it’s not deterred; it points at his wrists.

“Humans with wings,” it says carefully. “You k-kill us.”

“Us?”

“C-C-Co—” it stutters and then swallows hard, throat clicking. “Co—orpses. Corpses.”

Levi thinks that it’s really not fair for himself to be caught off-guard so many times in one day, even with the world as fucked up as it is. There has to be a limit somewhere, really. “Your mom was a corpse,” he says flatly, unable to even make it a question.

“Not always,” it says softly, looking back down at the locket in its hands. Its filthy fingers run over the gold surface absently, lost in thought. Levi watches it struggle with something before it bites its lip and jerkily holds out the pendant. “L-Look,” it mutters when he doesn’t react.

Carefully—the kid’s got some sort of thing about this necklace, obviously, and spooking it would be a bad idea—he takes hold of the locket and turns it over to reveal the picture inside. It’s of a relatively nondescript woman—long, brown hair and average facial features. A comparing glance between the two tells him that yes, the kid looks a hell of a lot like its mother, especially the eyes. The color doesn’t match—hers are a warm, natural hazel while his are unearthly green, but the size and shape and even the thick, sweeping eyelashes are all identical.

“You look like her,” is all Levi says, dropping the locket. It swings back and gently hits the kid in the chest, and it observes the picture inside a little bit more before almost reluctantly snapping it shut. “How’d it happen?”

It looks gloomy now, and the expression is vaguely familiar for some reason, but Levi can’t quite put his finger on why. The thought flutters away as soon as it had come, and he watches it take a seat on the floor and reach for the cardboard box of toiletries. It starts pulling out the colorful bottles one by one, neatly arranging them in front of him. Levi sits down across from it, figuring that it might be a bit of a wait before it responds.

It sucks in a harsh breath through its nose. “What are you asking?” it rasps, words stilted.

Levi frowns at it and shrugs. “What do you feel like answering?” he responds easily, and it pauses in its methodical movement and looks up, eyes wide in shock. Levi quirks a brow, finding himself less and less surprised by its emotional displays—really, he’s starting to understand Hanji’s fascination with studying corpses, and that’s not as unnerving as he feels like it should be. He waits.

“M-Mom was…” it starts, and then it trails off, staring at its hands. Its mouth twists. “D-Don’t know how… how she g-g-got like m-me. D-Don’t remem—ber. B-But she… She was hungry. One day.”

“Was she like you?”

Its eyes are haunted. “No.”

Levi’s mouth firms into a grim line. If he’s being honest with himself, he really doesn’t feel like hearing this story anymore—he regrets ever asking in the first place, actually, but he’d been curious and hadn’t thought before he’d spoken.

“Sh-She followed others. T-T-To the city. I wanted… wanted t-to keep her s-safe. But… humans—” Here, it motions jerkily to the inside of its wrists and then points to Levi’s. “—like you. S-Saw them. C-C-Couldn’t stop th-them. C-Couldn’t… keep her safe. And I h-had to run,” it whimpers, and there’s barely a moment of silence before it lets out a pained yell and knocks all of the bottles aside with a furious sweep of its arm. It scrambles to its feet and stumbles over to a shelf on the wall.

Levi watches, silent, as it rummages through the knickknacks and pulls away a small, lacquered jewelry box. His stomach is turning; the implications of this—a corpse displaying such a wide range of emotions attributed to humans alone—are nothing short of unspeakable. _‘The hell have we been doing?’_ he thinks numbly. _‘How many other corpses are like this one?’_

It sits back down in front of him and crosses its legs, refusing to meet his eyes as it flips open the lid of the box. Levi frowns; inside, the glitter of jewelry is visible even with the shitty lamplight, but the kid doesn’t seem interested in that. It bows its head and sniffs an unsteady breath, and he detects the faintest trace of old perfume, soft and floral. It’s an incredibly maternal scent, and Levi thinks that he honestly might be sick.

Levi had joined up later than most people did when they wanted to be in the military; the base age was fifteen years old, but that was with parental permission that his mother absolutely refused to give because she knew him too well and thought that a three year wait would change his mind.

It hadn’t, so on his eighteenth birthday, he’d come home with a formal notice of enlistment. She hadn’t taken it well.

And he’d been the oldest in his trainee squad, but it hadn’t mattered, because he’d trained every bit as hard as they had, all in the hopes of being a Scout who could survive outside of the walls.

All in the hopes of being a Scout who could contribute to humanity’s cause, and eradicate the corpses. Because corpses were monsters; they didn’t think, they didn’t bleed. They were uncaring, unfeeling, incapable of remorse.

 _‘But not this one,’_ he thinks, watching it inhale the scent of the jewelry box for comfort. Eventually, it clicks the lid shut and holds it as reverently as it had held the locket. _‘It thinks. It feels. Love for its mother. Grief for her death. How is this a corpse?’_

Levi’s thumbs trace the patches of skin on his inner wrists where he knows his wings are inked. “We’re called Scouts,” he says, and the kid’s focus snaps to him. “We train to go on missions outside the walls. Hold our own against corpses. Shoot first, ask questions later. They tell us corpses are monsters.” There’s a pregnant pause. Then, flatly, “You sure you didn’t bring me here to kill me?”

Levi had intended it to be a joke, but then again, he’s not one hundred percent sure. When it doesn’t answer, just looks at him with those unnervingly big, solemn eyes, he asks, “Do you hate me?”

For a moment, he wonders if it will even understand the question; its comprehension seems selective at best, but he still isn’t all that surprised when it answers immediately with, “Why w-would I hate you?”

“I’m a Scout. Killing corpses is my job. I didn’t gun down your mom, but I could have. If it’d been me, I would have put a bullet in her head, no hesitation. Probably wouldn’t have let you get away, either.” It’s harsh, but it’s reality. “Do you hate me?”

Its lower lip wobbles slightly, and the childishness of the action makes a phantom ache that almost resembles something like guilt throb in his chest. “Y-You would just b-b-be doing your job,” it says softly. “You’re t-trying to survive… J-Just like m-me. I… I don’t hate you,” it concludes, and the firm certainty in its voice bothers Levi. All the humans hated corpses. But this corpse didn't hate him.

He scratches the back of his head and tries to ignore the niggling little idea that’s suddenly sprung to life in his mind. It’s ridiculous. It’s stupid. It’s fucking batshit crazy.

But it’s suddenly all he can think about, and the more that he thinks about it, the stronger the little voice in the back of his head that sounds suspiciously like Hanji is urging him, _‘Why not? What do you have to lose?’_

Levi gets up and starts cleaning the mess, picking up the scattered bottles and tossing them back in the box. It’s late, and though his body is getting tired, his mind is wide-awake, thought tripping over each other almost too fast to keep track of. He waves away the kid when it tries to get up; he doesn’t need or want its help. He needs to think. He shoves the cardboard box back into its place behind the crate of food and surveys the supplies. There’s so much—plenty to last a decent while, and his plan starts to form.

His gaze sweeps over the kid, and he scowls. There’s a lot of preparation to be done, though. He’ll have to wait for rain, though he’ll waste some of the drinking water if it takes longer than a week. The sooner it’s done, the better. His mind running a mile a minute, he barks out a brusque, “Hey.” When it looks at him, he frowns at it and says, “I gotta get back to the city. Not right now, dumbass,” he snaps when it looks crestfallen. “What kind of fucking moron would journey to the city in the dark? I ain’t a suicidal bastard. Listen, I’m thinking that in a week, I’m going. No, don’t give me that fucking face, _listen_.”

Levi’s mouth twists in the only moment of self-doubt that he allows himself before he declares, “You’re comin’ with me when I do. There’s someone I gotta take you to.”

It’s eyes are the size of dinner plates, glassy with fear. “Wh-Who—”

“I got a friend back in the walls. Her name’s Hanji. She used to be a Scout, but she gave that up a while ago and sticks to research, mostly. About the corpses. A lot of what we know about you guys comes from her and her theories.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “It ain’t gonna be easy, but I know a way you can get in the walls without getting seen.”

“…What?” Levi snaps after a long while with no response. It blinks.

“You want me… to go… with you?”

“Didn’t I just fuckin’ say that?” Levi bites out, irritated. It’s giving him that weird look again—not like he’s food, but something more. When it falls back into stunned silence, he sighs and hunkers down to meet it at eye-level. “Look. I don’t fuckin’ get this. I don’t get you. And I’m not gonna stay out here in the middle of the old world without a regular supply of food and water—as decent as all this is,” he says, gesturing to the supplies, “—it ain’t gonna last forever, and I’ll be fucked when that happens. I gotta get back to Sina, and you’re coming with me.”

“I’m a corpse, though,” it croaks, sounding pained. “… Right?”

“Kid, I don’t know what the hell you are. But if there’s anyone who can give me an answer, it’s Hanji.” Levi stands up again and strips off his shirt, feeling the disgusting stick of soiled cloth as it pulls away from his skin. He grimaces and pokes around the supplies for a bit, having a hunch that turns out to be correct when he tugs a blanket out and gives it a cautionary sniff. He wraps it around himself without further hesitation; it smells as clean as anything gets nowadays, and without electricity or heat, the basement is freezing. “You got a lot of shit down here,” he mutters, but it’s not insulting, and he’s faintly pleased when the kid seems to pick up on that, offering him a short, tentative smile.

Levi rests in the corner, back pressed to the wall, but he doesn’t close his eyes; if he does end up getting any sleep this night, it’ll be because he’s simply too exhausted to stay conscious rather than because he’s actively trying. The blanket’s a bit scratchy, but he’s not about to complain.

He’s alive, after all. He should be grateful. His eyes inadvertently fall back on the corpse, and he calls out a soft, “Hey, you.” It looks over at him, and the amount of rapt attention in its gaze almost makes him want to laugh. “You gotta remember your name before we go, alright? Or I’m pickin’ the first thing that pops into my head and sticking with that.”

“Levi.”

“Hm?”

It bites at its lower lip and looks at the ground. “C-Can’t you just call me that?”

Levi snorts. “Why would I call you that when you have your own name? Just remember it and we’ll be peachy fuckin’ keen.”

“I… I like y-your name.”

“… Shut the fuck up.”

~~~

I wait until Levi falls asleep to move closer to him. I know, that’s weird, but the last time that I remember being around somebody else, it was my mother, and corpses don’t sleep, so I couldn’t sit right next to her in complete silence and stillness like I can now. By now, I’ve given up any and all attempts at not creepy and accept it for what it is as I watch him sleep. Sleeping seems really fascinating, I think. It took him a long time to drop off, but I knew the moment he did. His heartbeat changed.

The lamp went out a while ago, but I can still see his face in the dark. He looks angry even when he sleeps. It makes me want to smile again, so I do, testing out the unfamiliar sensation of my mouth stretching. I wonder what I look like when I smile. There’s a mirror around here somewhere—actually, there’s a few—but I don’t want to risk making noise and waking Levi up.

Levi said I look like my mom. My hand reaches up and closes around her locket. I’m holding the box in my lap. It belonged to her, too. I remember that now. It was in one of the rooms upstairs that had a big, green bed and a dusty dresser. The box used to be on top of the dresser, and I brought it downstairs one day because I wanted to keep it somewhere I thought it would always be safe.

When my mom was still around, she used to stand in that room a lot. She’d spend a lot of time staring at a space on the wall, a square patch that was lighter than the rest. I think something used to be there, but I don’t remember what.

My attention is back on Levi now. I think about everything he told me.

How he wants me to go to the city with him. How he knows a person that studies corpses, and she’ll probably study me.

How he sees me as more than that, though. More than just a corpse. I know I’m different from the others—that much is obvious. I don’t travel in a horde, I don’t like to eat people, I don’t want to be a corpse. I don’t know who I used to be, but I remember parts.

Not one of the most important parts, though. My brows furrow in a frown, and I try to reach into the deepest parts of my mind that I’m still aware of. I look where all my other memories are. There has to be something.

I hold my head in my hands, the cold heels of my palms pressing into my temples. I push, thinking maybe the pressure will do something for me, and there’s a little bit of dull pain before there’s a pop of sensation deep in my skull, and something crackles to life and skitters across my brain. It’s a memory, hazy and duller than I’d like, but it’s there. It’s my mom, standing at a table. The room is bright—she’s bright and healthy, not a listless corpse. She’s smiling at me, I know that—she’s smiling and saying something, but there’s no sound to go along with this picture in my head. I wish there was; it’s been so long since I’ve heard her voice. It’s been so long.

Her mouth moves around a word, and the memory freezes before it loops back. She’s saying something to me. It’s important. I know it’s important, and it keeps repeating, over and over, soundless. Dimly, I move my lips to copy hers, the shape of whatever she’s saying syncing up, and—

_‘E—’_

—it’s then that—

‘— _en_.’

—sound fades in. My eyes snap open. The locket falls out of my hand and the box tumbles out of my lap. Glittering gold pieces spill everywhere, and my chest hurts. It throbs, one painful beat.

_‘Eren.’_


	4. Hungry Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His name is Eren.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, mega apologies that this took so long and is also unedited trash, but I'd like to remind everyone that this project still takes a backseat to Keep Your Head Up. I hope you'll forgive me for that! But rest assured, no matter how long it goes between updates, this story is NOT abandoned, nor will it be.

I’ve decided that names taste good.

There’s a flavor to the words, repeating, now that my mouth knows how to shape them. I don’t really remember tastes—there’s nothing delicious about gray matter going down my throat, no matter what humans believe about corpses. No matter what humans believe about me. It’s hot, I know—the blood, the life—but heat is a feeling and not a flavor, and even though I don’t remember what anything tasted like before I changed, I remember what it was like to read those hardcover books that fill half of a shelf on my wall of things. I took them from upstairs, too; they’ve got pictures on the front of smiling women, plump and pink-cheeked, surrounded by food from the old world. There’s more pictures on the insides of the books, too—crisped, cooked meat that’s golden brown, bright greens and fruits, noodles dripping sauce. And sweets, fluffy and pretty. Lots of things about the old world were pretty.

None of it seems appetizing to me, but it’s nice to look at. And now that I can’t read, I do have those pictures, at least. But I remember when I could read, and I remember the words that described the food. Flavors. Words like sour, sharp, tangy, bitter, sweet, creamy, and a lot more that I’ve forgotten. But I still remember those, and I remember all the time I spent wishing that I still had memories of experiencing them.

I used to think that maybe if I could pretend that what I was eating so I wouldn’t waste away was something else—if I could shut my eyes and pretend with flavors—maybe then it would be easier. Maybe I could accept what I am and what I do.

It wasn’t. It won’t ever be. I can’t.

My mind goes to the small chunk of brain matter that I have secreted away in my pocket. My stomach rolls, twists, and my throat feels like something’s blocking it. It tightens, closing off air that I don’t need anyway, and I swallow. I taste nothing. But there’s a word for this feeling. There’s a word for what I would taste, if I could, as my mind remains fixed on the last piece of Levi’s squad—the closest and only bit of them that he has, that I can’t ever let him know about.

Because I don’t want him to hate me.

I don’t know if that makes me bad. There’s already a lot that makes me bad. I don’t know if I should add this to the list.

I stop myself from holding onto these thoughts. They already spend so much time in my head. I want to think about the names. I want to think about the taste of names.

Levi’s name tastes hard. Like rock. Or like bone, strong bone. But it’s good. I know it’s good. All I have—all I’ve had for who knows how long—is softness in my mouth. People are soft. When you bite, they give. They get softer the more I chew. Physically, it’s not hard to swallow.

I hate it. I hate that people are so soft. Why can’t they be something else? Why is it so easy to eat them?

Would I feel less like a monster if I had to fight for my own existence instead of being able to take the life that someone else had, to keep my own, faster than a blink? It’s so easy, though. Even with their weapons and their strength, it’s still so easy.

But not Levi.

He is his name. I practiced when he slept, over and over, and he is—I know it. It’s one of the only things I know, for certain. The place my tongue rests, just up against the backs of my teeth before the push off and slide back of the muscle when my mouth stretches a little wider, almost like I would if I were going to smile. That first syllable. And then way my bottom lip curls in to meet my top few teeth, barely touching before my mouth moves back open, shaped too round to be ‘A’ but not round enough to be ‘O’. The ‘I’. His name. Short and sharp and solid.

Levi. That’s him.

I was silent when I practiced because I didn’t want him to wake up. But I’m sure I could say it now without stuttering. I know his name. Levi. I like the way it fits in my mouth. If I could survive on that, I might be okay.

But for all I know, I can’t. For all I know, Levi could be what kills me. He’s a human and I’m not. And he has to go back, back to the walled city, back to his other humans. He’s going to take me with him—he said so—to see his friend. But maybe he won’t be able to get me there. Maybe we won’t ever reach his friend; maybe the other humans, the ones with wings that are like him but not really, will kill me.

Maybe we won’t even make it that far.

Levi.  I want to fix his name in my mouth and leave it there, so I can think about how it tastes more than I think about bad things. Hard. Steel-sharp. Bone-strong. A name like that—a human like that—it’ll be okay. He’ll be okay. He’ll make it back to the walled city. That’s what’ll be, and I won’t let my half-working mind convince me that anything else will happen. Maybe I’ll make it there with him, and die because of him. Maybe something will happen on the way, and I’ll die for him. That could happen too, but either way, he’ll make it back for sure. Either way, I’ll have been with him.

 _‘Or…’_ My own voice in my head takes my thoughts to a new place. _‘Levi could just go. He could just go back to humans in the walled city, their new world, and leave you here alone in your old one.’_

From my place on the floor, leaning back against the wall and looking at but not really seeing the golden glow of the re-lit lamp, I look up.

_‘Levi.’_

He’s towering over me only because he’s standing and I’m not, but he doesn’t need to do that to make it clear that he’s got more power than I do. Even now, with no weapons and sealed in a basement alone with a corpse, he has power. I remember the way he’d kicked me back in the ruined city, the first time I tried to talk to him.

I think he could’ve killed me. He didn’t, but I do think he could have.

I stare at him, at the way he looks down his nose at me, surly. His eyes remind me of the way metal looks. Sometimes his eyes remind me of the way metal feels, too—or the way it would feel when somebody sticks me with a pointy piece, cutting, if I could feel pain with this body. This body doesn’t feel, though; no matter how many wounds humans open in me or how many times I look down and see ugly bruises on my skin, I can’t feel a thing. This body doesn’t feel.

Levi’s does, though. All humans do, but I’m more fascinated by how his does. He looks so different from me—shorter but thicker all around, in the chest, arms, thighs. Muscle, I remember. The word is muscle. Humans with wings always have a lot—they’re stronger for it, and they need to be—but I’ve never been so close to someone. I’ve never been able to notice it.

I notice a lot. Levi’s skin is one thing; his arms are bare so I see the bulge of muscle as he crosses them over his chest. There’s marks on his skin, faint pink indents left by the gloves he had on. A red spot that hasn’t faded all the way yet on his cheek from sleeping with his face pressed against the floor. There’s other marks too. Permanent scars. Most are old and pale, but a few look raw. I noticed a small one earlier when I was watching him sleep; it just barely cuts into his left eyebrow, a small split where the hair doesn’t grow.

His skin is too pale. I noticed that, too. He’s strong and can survive, but his skin is almost sallow, and there’s dark shadows under his eyes. There’s an almost constant pucker on his brow, too. But that doesn’t surprise me; he frowns a lot, but he has reasons to. I tried to practice frowning while he was sleeping, but I didn’t like it very much. I liked practicing names more.

_‘Levi.’_

There’s hard flavor to the name, but it’s good. That’s what I’ve decided. Hardness in this old world is good. Humans who are hard can survive. It’s the soft ones who don’t.

“Tell me again.”

I blink; I’ve been staring at Levi, but he’s also still been staring at me. It takes me a second to understand the command.

I open my mouth; I’ve practiced this name, too. “Eren.”

He doesn’t blink or look away. “You sure?”

Levi sounds like he’ll be mad if I’m not. I don’t know why; it’s not his name, after all. It’s mine. “Y-Yes. I remember. I kn-know it’s right.” I breathe; dust motes are drifting through the air, visible in the light. “Eren.”

My name tastes like something, but I don’t remember what. It’s warm, though. It makes me feel warm. And there’s something—not soft, not human, but… it’s different. I’m stiff and cold because I’m a corpse. But I’m Eren. Eren is not a corpse. Eren is Eren.

I’m Eren.

My name is Eren.

~~~

His name is Eren.

It’s morning—or at least, Levi thinks so, but he can’t tell because there are no windows in this basement. The lamp has been relit, and Eren sits in front of it, cross-legged and staring down at the flame as he picks at the filthy skin of his fingertips and waits for Levi to say something to him.

Levi would ask for a surname, but the fact that, in the few hours he’d managed to sleep, Eren had remembered his first name is enough of a wonder as it is. Hoping for his last is a stretch that Levi doesn’t particularly care to make; his first name is good enough. It’s an identity remembered, and that’s all he needs. Hanji would probably call it a miracle, but that’s a word that no one throws around anymore because no one really believes that something like that exists.

And Levi is certain that a miracle is the last thing that anyone else would consider Eren to be.

In the middle of the lengthy silence between them, Levi favors pacing the corner rather than sitting there and watching Eren, but no matter his train of thought or the importance of the plans he that he means to form, he finds his eyes drawn back to the boy on the floor over and over again. Observing, cataloguing the details—filthy, torn clothes that need to be replaced, grimy skin that needs to be scrubbed practically raw since that’s the closest to clean as it’ll ever get, and hair so disgusting and tangled that even multiple washes and an extremely durable comb won’t be enough to fix the problem—he’ll have to shear it off.

He’s glad, now, that scalpels had been the only sort of weapon he’d taken from the hospital. At least they’ll have their uses, even if it’s not what he’d planned on needing them for. Levi isn’t sure yet whether this is a good thing or not. It might be that he will need them for what he’d thought he’d be using them for, in time, if things sour. Killing isn’t easy, and it never will be. But it’s his duty, and he’s never had a reason to question it.

Not until Eren.

He frowns. There’s a lot to do. A lot to prepare, and even if Eren’s appearance can be tamed enough for him to pass the test of a cursory glance from a stranger—from a soldier—without setting off any mental alarms, there’s no guarantee that he’ll be able to do anything more.

The vocal issues could be passed off as a severe speech impediment, though. Maybe.

If he’s lucky.

Levi ghosts his fingers across his brow, then down over closed eyelids, the tired gesture speaking volumes about how his minimal amount of sleep hasn’t alleviated any of the exhaustion that’s weighing him down by the ton. If anything, allowing himself the luxury of sleep has made it worse. The brief respite from this shithole of a situation makes the return to wakefulness—to reality—harsher than a slap across the face.

His mind is running in circles, draining him, and he hasn’t even been up for an hour yet.

“Levi?”

The only sign that he’s heard Eren is the questioning grunt he gives in response; he puts his back to the boy, listening with only half an ear; he needs to think.

As best he can, Eren continues, “You said y-y-you… You said you—would—get me i-in the walls.”

Now, Levi turns. Silently, he raises a brow, an irritated frown faint on his lips.

Eren doesn’t seem to register Levi’s displeasure, much less be put off by it. He asks, “How? W-Won’t they kill—”

“I’m gonna make you look human. Or close as you can get, anyways.”

Eren blinks, and Levi watches him process the statement, can practically hear the rusty cogs turning in his head. Now that he’s accepted—or at least acknowledged that he’s got no choice but to accept—the anomaly that is Eren, priority number one is studying him closely. Observing. He doesn’t know what information will be important and what will be irrelevant, but anything he can present to Hanji when he gets back is better than having fuck-all to go on.

“How?” Eren repeats.

Now Levi approaches him, crouching down in front of him and reaching out to grab his jaw with strong fingers, turning his head this way and that. Eren freezes completely, and Levi briefly thinks of the way the stray cats in the back alleys of Sina go limp when street children grab them by the scruff of their necks to play with them.

“It ain’t gonna be easy,” Levi says at last, releasing Eren from his grip and wiping the grime that comes off on his fingers onto his pants, for all the good that does. Eren’s eyes follow the movement of his hand. “You look like shit. Worse than shit. Not that everyone in the walls looks much better, but it’s pretty fuckin’ obvious that you’re not human.”

Eren looks away from him at that, something flashing in his eyes before they’re hidden by the dirty hair flopping down over his face. Levi’s lip curls. He decides that needs to be fixed immediately, and he calls Eren’s name. Eren jolts like he’s been shot, and he looks back up with an expression that actually passes for quizzical.

Levi ignores the discomfort he feels at a corpse making facial expressions. “Is there a way to get to the roof?”

Eren gapes for a while before he finally responds with, “Huh?”

“The roof. Can you get up there? Or any place high enough that the corpses can’t get to it?”

Slowly, Eren stumbles to his feet and stares up at the dark ceiling, as if he can somehow actually see through it. “I… I th-think I could. Upstairs. I-In the—” He freezes for a bit, mouth open and throat working. “The… f-f-food room?”

Levi squints at him. “A kitchen?”

He isn’t expecting the way that Eren’s eyes light up with wonder. “K-Kit—chen,” he whispers almost reverently. “Kitchen. In there. S-Stairs up.”

“Up to where?”

“R-Rooms. S-S-Sss…” Eren trails off with a hiss, bushy brows furrowing deeply as his gaze drops to the floor. A short, guttural growl of frustration vibrates low in his throat. “S-Sleeping rooms.”

Levi watches him carefully. “Bedrooms,” he corrects. The dark look on Eren’s face melts away, and he mouths the words, nodding.

“B-Bedrooms. Out the window, o-onto the roof.” He looks at Levi and then says, “I used to sit up there.”

Levi blinks hard; the sentence is so simple, but the way Eren says it—without a single stutter or hesitation, with something that sounds like nostalgia—catches him off guard. The only thing he can say is, “Oh.”

“N-Nobody can get you i-if you’re up high,” Eren says. “C-Corpses can’t reach. O-or climb.”

 _‘But you can,’_ Levi thinks, face betraying nothing. _‘You can climb.’_ There’s a pregnant pause before he says brusquely, “Yeah, why do you think we have walls?”

“To keep c-corpses out,” comes the immediate answer. Levi rolls his eyes, reminding himself that being unable to understand rhetorical questions is something he should expect from a being who couldn’t even remember his own name not twelve hours ago.

“I’ve got a plan,” he says, gaze flicking to Eren’s face; he looks like he understands, or if not, he’s at least listening closely. “And the first thing it involves is getting you a fuckin’ bath; you stink,” he says, lip curling. He’s sure he smells no better, and the air inside the walls always smells like shit—shit and smoke. But he figures that it’s probably been years since Eren has bathed; he smells as rank as he looks. Levi grimaces. “We need water first. _Not_ drinking water,” he snaps when Eren turns towards the packages piled high. “Not if we can help it.”

“But,” Eren starts, throat clicking as he searches for the words. Levi is patient. “W-Where will we get it?”

“It’s spring,” Levi says, turning and making for the stairs; Eren shuffles close behind. “We find something to hold the water, get it up on the roof, wait for the rain,” he explains, thinking back on the journey into the city that ended up being his squad’s last. His gut twists, guilt sour in the back of his mouth. There had been clouds then, thick and heavy in the sky. _‘Shouldn’t take long if I’m lucky,’_ he thinks, stopping at the base of the stairs. He glances at Eren. _‘Lucky. One way to put it.’_

The staircase leads up into darkness, but Levi knows that a heavy metal door barred shut waits at the top. Past that, the remains of this house sit, cloaked in dust and cobwebs. The windows, he remembers, have been boarded up, and the only entrance is locked and sealed with a bookcase he’d shoved over the front door himself. To find what he needs, Levi will need to explore the house.

But the house could be vulnerable. It’s more vulnerable than the basement, that’s certain.

“Eren.”

He blinks, eyes bright. Alert.

“When was the last time you saw another corpse around here?” Levi asks, frowning. There hadn’t been any on their way in from the city, but even so…

The glimmer in Eren’s eyes fades a bit as his mind works, reaching for the answer. His fingers twitch against each other, dirty fingernails clicking. “D-Don’t remember.”

Levi frowns, giving a minute shake of his head. “That ain’t good enough. I gotta know if it’s safe enough to go up there. If it ain’t, we’re fucked.”

The click of Eren’s nails speeds up and grows louder. “N-No, I… I don’t remember. Before my m-m-m-mo—” The word chokes off in his throat with a squeak of sound. Eren stiffens, all movement ceasing. Then, slowly, his hand reaches up for the locket dangling around his neck. “Before. My m-m-mom. Before we went t-to the city and she…” Eren’s brow pinches. “No one came back. Just me. I-I—” He looks at Levi, voice plaintive. “I’ve been alone.”

Levi is about to say that the risk is only worth it if Eren is certain that nothing will come around to pose a threat, but a breath hitches in his throat, green eyes flickering, and the locket slips out of his grasp, thumping against his chest. “It was a year ago.”

The hair on Levi’s arms begins to prickle, goosebumps rising. That sounded like Eren, but it didn’t. It was sure, no hint of a stutter or hesitation, not even in the weak tone that Eren usually mutters in. “What?” he says, the words snapping, drawing Eren’s attention. His eyes are clear.

So very clear.

“The last time I saw any corpses around here was a year ago,” Eren says, gaze unwavering. “None of them came back from the city. That day. I’m the only one here.”

The hairs on the back of Levi’s neck are standing on end, but he refuses to give away his unease. “Where did they all go?”

“They stayed in the city,” Eren answers. There’s a beat of silence as his nostrils flare, and then he confesses, “Because it smells like humans there. It doesn’t here.”

Levi blinks hard; that makes sense. _‘They’re smarter than we give ‘em credit for,’_ he thinks, remembering Dr. Jaeger’s speech. _Corpses look human. They are not. They do not think, they do not bleed._

 _‘Instinct,’_ Levi realizes. _‘They have instincts. Just like animals. Just like humans.’_

“Okay,” he says.

Eren cocks his head. “O—kay?”

“Okay. I trust you. We go upstairs.” Levi steps back, sweeping his arm out at the staircase and pointing up into the darkness. “But you go first.”

Eren’s eyes change. They darken, shadows passing within as his gaze flicks down to Levi’s pockets. His scalpels are in there. Eren meets his eyes once more. “I g-go first?”

Levi remains silent, watching him.

Eren’s throat bobs as he swallows. Dark eyes. “Y-You… trust… me?”

Levi doesn’t look away. “I trust you,” he repeats.

All at once, the shadows fade. Eren’s eyes are strangely luminescent in the darkness of the basement, the lamp lit but far from them at the other end. He blinks, and they glimmer. Clear. “…I trust you,” he says.

Levi nods, and he follows close behind as Eren turns and heads up the stairs without another word.

~~~

“Why’d you stay down there?” Levi asks him on the first day. “In the fuckin’ dark. In a smaller space. Why?”

They’ve relocated to the main part of the house—or rather, Levi has. For whatever reason, Eren prefers to remain in the basement, though the metal door stays open and Levi can always see the faint glow of lamplight shining up the staircase whenever he passes by. Levi had taken blankets for sleeping on, rags, and two bottles of water that he figured could be spared for the sake of wetting the rags and wiping the dust off of the surfaces in what used to be a living room. It’s not clean, but it’s not filthy. He’ll make do; they won’t be staying much longer. The sky is overcast as ever and looks ready to break open at any moment; there’ll be rain by the end of the week, he’s sure.

Eren glances up from the plastic bin in his hands; it’d been shoved in the back of a hall closet with a couple of others, half-full of shoes and dust. In Sina, houses have rain barrels, but Levi had looked and found none here, so the bins will hold rainwater well enough, once Eren wipes it clean like Levi had ordered him to. He takes to the task with a single-minded determination that Levi almost admires. Obedience is a positive trait in humans; in corpses, it’s unheard of. _‘Hanji’ll shit,_ ’ he thinks, not for the first time.

“I like it down there,” Eren says after a while. He scrubs at a corner of the bin, mulling over the words in his head. His speech comes without stutters, but it’s more slow than smooth. He’s trying hard, Levi can tell. “It’s mine. This…” he trails off, looking about him. The room is dark even in the middle of the day. There are spots of discoloration on the wall that mark where photos must’ve hung, before whoever lived here packed up and left.

“This isn’t mine,” Eren continues. “I… I stay here. But I don’t own. But down there,” he mutters, head tilting in the direction of the hallway where the metal door hangs open. “I own that. Those things. It’s my place. I’m safe there.”

Levi has nothing to say in response, and Eren doesn’t seem to care, dutifully cleaning away. ‘ _He likes having something to do with his hands,’_ Levi thinks. He’s noticed the way Eren is always touching things; sometimes he wraps a fist around the locket, sometimes he plucks snow globes off of the shelves downstairs and turns them in his hands, and other times he picks up a book just to flip through the pages, though he can’t make sense of the words. Everything he has is downstairs, and it stays there.

_“I’m safe there.”_

Goosebumps prickle on Levi’s arms, making him frown and scratch at them in irritation.

The thought that a corpse would need a safe haven is discomfiting; after all, they hunt down the humans and consume them to live. They’re predators, that’s what Levi and all his fellow soldiers were trained to believe. That’s what every human is trained to believe. Corpses wouldn’t fear anything. Corpses don’t even feel.

Later, Levi catches Eren staring at his wrists, where his wings are inked. A small voice in his mind that grows louder by the hour tells him that what he’s been trained to believe is wrong.

~~~

The second day, they’re sparing a few more bottles of water to clean out the only tub in a dingy little bathroom upstairs when Eren asks, “Wh-What’s it like? In the walls?”

Levi re-soaks the rag and considers the question, the quiet drip of water droplets hitting the bottom of the tub punctuating the silence. Beside him, Eren is still, waiting for an answer. “Shitty,” he says.

Eren cocks his head, and Levi has to look away because the action is so childlike that it’s disturbing. It lends Eren an innocence that corpses aren’t supposed to have. “Why?” he asks.

Levi’s brows knit and the corners of his mouth twitch down in a frown before he replies, “Keep cleaning and I’ll tell you.” When Eren obeys, Levi continues, “It always smells bad. You notice it less the farther away from the gates you get, but the military tents are there, so that’s where I always am. It stinks. Everything smells like smoke from the fires and shit from the people.” His mouth twists. “And people are always hungry.”

Eren pauses. “Why?” he repeats. “D-Don’t humans have food?”

“Clean,” Levi snaps, and Eren turns back to his task. “We do. But it’s a ration system so there ain’t any more than what the government thinks you deserve.” Levi scowls down at the half-cleaned tub. “Most people get enough to not starve. But no one gets enough to stay full.”

 _‘Except for government officials,’_ Levi thinks bitterly. But for every one man well-fed, there are dozens of children too young to work. And only those who work—only those who have the means of being able to afford food in the first place—qualify to receive rations from the government. So those dozens of children starve. _‘You only get fed if you contribute to ‘the survival and flourishing of humanity’. Elsewise, nobody gives a shit about you. What fuckin’ bullshit.’_

It’s why the military is never in short supply of recruits. A starving person will sign away their life if it puts food in their mouth. And the government will keep them alive for training so they can die outside the walls. Everybody knows this. But he doesn’t voice any of this to Eren; Levi suspects that he wouldn’t understand.

“What does it look like?” Eren asks softly. He’s been absentmindedly scrubbing at the same spot for a while now, lost in thought.

“Crowded,” is Levi’s deadpan reply. “So many fuckin’ people everywhere.”

Silence stretches between them at that, but a little while later, Eren stills and whispers, “It m-must be nice though.” He has a faraway look in his eyes, but it’s not the same vacant stare usually attributed to a corpse. “Not being alone.” He turns his head and looks at Levi, plaintive. “Isn’t it?”

Levi isn’t sure what to say, but Eren is waiting for an answer.

“Keep cleaning,” is his only reply.

~~~

The sky breaks open in the late afternoon of the third day, heralded by a boom of thunder so loud that it shakes the house. Eren is out the second-level window of a bedroom bare save for a bed with creaky springs and an old teak dresser just as the rain begins to pour in sheets; Levi shoves two bins out the window with him, and he sticks his neck out to watch as Eren sidles over and sits down on the roof, an arm around each bin to keep it from sliding down the slanted surface.

“You better not fall,” Levi calls to him over the thunder. A bolt of lightning splits the sky in the distance.

Eren looks at him, the odd shine of his eyes cutting through the dark of the storm. “T-Trust me,” he calls back, voice cracking in its earnestness.

Levi blinks, rainwater in his eyes, running in rivulets down his face. Eren must be soaked to the bone, but he’d wanted to sit out on the roof with the bins. Corpses don’t get cold, was what he’d said. He’d assured Levi that he’d wait out the storm.

“I trust you.”

Levi shuts the window after that, but he stays in the old bedroom with nothing but a lantern for company as night begins to fall and the storm rages. At one point, he dozes and wakes again to find that the shadows in the room have changed, and the fierce pounding of rain against the windowpane is nothing more than a soft drizzle.

He pulls himself off the floor and opens the window; the world is dark, but when he sticks his neck out and looks to the side, there is Eren, bins at his sides and eyes luminescent. “How long’s it been?” Levi asks.

Eren shrugs. “A long time. The b-bins are half full.”

Levi nods; it’s not a lot, but it’s good enough. He’s grown impatient; the sooner they head out for the city, the better. “Bring ‘em here. We gotta clean you up.”

~~~

He sits Eren in the tub, naked, as he upends the bins and sends water pouring onto his head. It’s cold, but Eren doesn’t feel it. The box full of sundries and some water at his side, Levi grabs a bright bottle of body wash and squirts it into a wet rag before handing it to Eren. “Start cleaning,” he says, and Eren obeys.

The only light in the bathroom is coming from the lamp Levi had set down by the door, but it’s still just enough for him to see Eren. And the extent of the damage done to the boy’s body, gone unseen because of his filthy clothes, turns Levi’s stomach.

He may not have fought Levi’s squad, but Eren has been shot at before. They’re old wounds, the small, dark holes in his gray-tinged skin a testament to the people—Levi’s people, the Scouts—who had shot first without knowing what they were trying to kill. There’s one on his left side and two on his arm. Levi finds himself hoping that the bullets aren’t still in him. He’ll have to mention it to Hanji.

Eren’s skin is mottled, discolored by bruises and death and covered in layers of grime. The sight of all the dark marks makes Levi wonder who Eren had been fighting before he died; someone had hit him good. He wonders if Eren had a loved one who’d tried to kill him before he could become a corpse.

He almost looks for the fatal bite mark but tells himself that there’s time for that later, when they’re with Hanji. For now, Levi takes a scalpel out of his pocket, tells Eren to keep scrubbing, and grabs a hank of filthy brown hair in his free hand. He begins to shear it off, bit by bit, tossing the severed locks onto the floor; no amount of washing and brushing can save it, so he decides the best course is to cut it short. A pair of scissors would’ve come in handy, but Levi found none and so he’ll make do. Either way, it works.

Before long, the bathwater is filthy and matted hair litters the floor, but Levi nods at the box says, “I’ll use all these damn bottles if it gets you to stop smelling like shit. You won’t be clean, but you’ll be cleaner. Keep washing.”

“Okay,” is the soft reply.

“You got a lotta hair,” Levi mutters, irritated at how long it’s taking. Honestly, he knows he could nick Eren with the blade and he wouldn’t feel pain, but Levi refuses to be anything but cautious. Just because physical pain wouldn’t register, doesn’t mean Eren wouldn’t feel something. Eren’s hair is left shorter and shorter until all that remains are the long locks at the base of his neck. Levi grabs a section and saws it off, and then he snorts.

“You got dirt everywhere,” he mutters, rubbing a thumb over the dark smudge half-hidden by the rest of the hair. Eren doesn’t react to the touch, dutifully scrubbing away, staring at the bubbles formed under his hands. He doesn’t flinch when Levi rubs at the smudge harder and clicks his tongue in disapproval when the filth doesn’t come away.

“Stubborn stain,” Levi begins to say, but his words drop off before he’s even gotten past the second syllable as he pulls back the next section of hair and bares the nape of Eren’s neck. His mouth goes dry.

There, on Eren’s skin, is a carefully inked pair of wings. One light, one dark.

The mark of a Scout.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> This is so unedited and I am trash and I also actually know nothing about guns and zombie apocalypses okay oh lord please bear with me, haha. I am actually having a lot of fun writing this, though, like. Wowie. Thank you for reading!
> 
> P.S. I am also tracking a tag called, fic: a little less dead where I will link any updates in when they happen okay thank


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